GPG

Updated: 10/04/2017 by Computer Hope

GNU Privacy Guard, also called GnuPG or GPG for short, is an alternative to the PGP (pretty good privacy) suite of encryption software. The Free Software Foundation includes GPG in its GNU software project. GPG is compliant with RFC 4880, the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standards specification for OpenPGP. It receives funding from around the world, including a large portion from the German government.

The production version of GPG was released on September 7, 1999, and developed by Werner Koch. It was ported to the Windows operating system in 2000. The basic version of GPG features a command line interface, but there are front-end applications that provide users with a graphical user interface for GPG.

You can download GPG tools for Windows at the GPG4Win website and GPG tools for other platforms at the GPGTools website.

Computer acronyms, Front end, Graphical user interface, Security terms