En/gnu privacy guard

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Welcome to Simone Giustetti's wiki pages.


Languages: English - Italiano

GNU Privacy Guard

GPG, short for GNU Privacy Guard, is a software suite that allows you to encrypt your personal data. GPG is a free and open source implementation of the OpenPGP standard, granted full compatibility, proposed by the Internet Engineering Task Force and can be used to encrypt and sign files and e-mails. GPG is a stable and mature product with many years of development behind. GPG is maintained by a large community of developers and funded by several public and private organizations including the German government.

The base GPG version provides a wide variety of command line tools, moreover a great number of front-end applications and GUIs are available to integrate it with many widely diffused operating systems and desktop environments, greatly simplifying the learning curve and allowing anyone to use it successfully. GPG was ported to run on many operating systems and mobile platforms: Android, Linux / Unix, MacOsX and Windows. Finally many plug-ins and extensions for popular e-mail programs were developed over the years making GPG the perfect choice to enhance Apple Mail, KMail, Mutt, Outlook, Thunderbird and more.

GPG Internals

Three distinct GPG major versions are available:

  • 1.4.x is the old stable branch. Please install it only if you need compatibility with old installations and operating systems.
  • 2.0.x is the new stable release which you are recommended to install.
  • 2.1.x is a development release including all of the new functionality for preview and testing purposes. The 2.1 release includes support for elliptic cryptography, considered by many the successor of asymmetric cryptography.

Use of the 2.0 release is recommended for every user not in need of new functionality or to communicate with persons still using the old 1.4 release.

Up to date information about GPG and its internals are available in the official documentation. As previously stated GPG was ported to a multitude of platforms over the years. The software works the same way on every one. Below I'll provide links to platform specific information. Among other the differences may include:

  • Paths to configuration files and user data.
  • Installation and upgrade procedures.
  • How to start daemons / services; GPA for example.
  • Some other minor architecture related quirks.


To contact me or leave me your feedback, Please e-mail at studiosg [at] giustetti [dot] net.


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Languages: English - Italiano

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