PGP

PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy. It’s software that implements encryption for encrypting files, performing digital signing, and more. GnuPG or GPG ↗ is an open-source implementation of the OpenPGP standard

GPG is commonly used in email to protect the confidentiality of the email messages. Furthermore, it can be used to sign an email message and confirm its integrity.

To generate a gpg key: execute gpg --full-gen-key and fill in preferences.

• Now that you have your GPG key pair, you can share the public key with your contacts. Whenever your contacts want to communicate securely, they encrypt their messages to you using your public key. To decrypt the message, you will have to use your private key. Due to the importance of the GPG keys, it is vital that you keep a backup copy in a secure location.

• You would use gpg --import backup.key to import your key from backup.key

• To decrypt your messages, you need to issue gpg --decrypt confidential_message.gpg