History

PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) was created by Phil Zimmermann. He used the well known RSA algorithm, published 1978, for the asymmetric keys. His program became commonly used very fast and a lot of users all over the world adopted it. Phil Zimmermann gave it away for free. However he almost went into prison for this. As he was American and the program was used outside the US, he was accused for having it illegaly exported. Starting from version 2, the program was exported printed as a book and scanned and manually entered in Scandinavia to create an international version. A lot of users still use PGP2.6.3i.

Besides the export problems, the algorithms are problematic. The RSA labs were able to get a patent for the RSA algorithm, regardless of the fact that it was already published in 1977 by Rivest, Shamir and Adleman. The symmetric algorithm used, IDEA, is also covered by a patent, also in Europe, and only strictly private use is possible without having to pay a fee to Ascom Ltd. Newer versions of PGP (5.x, 6.x) used other algorithms, but the program was no longer available for free for everybody. In commercial environments, fees had to be paid. So, a lot of people did never accept PGP5 or later.

Therefore a new project came up: Gnu Privacy Guard, called GnuPG or gpg. It was created within Europe to prevent the US regulations and patented algorithms were avoided. It is designed to comply to the OpenPGP (RFC2440) specification and released under the GNU GPL Copyleft. The version 1.0.0 was released in September 1999.