PGP Algorithms Overview

Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is a data encryption and decryption method that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is often used for signing, encrypting, and decrypting texts, e-mails, files, directories, and whole disk partitions and to increase the security of e-mail communications

Sender of a PGP encrypted message uses a Public Key to encode the message.

Receiver of a PGP encrypted message uses a password to get the Private Key that will decode the message.

PGP and similar software follow the OpenPGP standard (RFC 4880) for encrypting and decrypting data.

See following link on the PGP International site for an extended description of PGP encryption:

http://www.pgpi.org/doc/pgpintro/

or see the following Wikipedia link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy