#Symantec encryption desktop pgp software#
#Symantec encryption desktop pgp professional#

two Signature Packets, one of which is normally of type 0x13 (certification) and one of type 0x18 (subkey binding), generated thanks to the (main) private key, and used to certify the key and the subkey along with their respective properties.a User ID Packet, usually containing the user’s name and/or email.

a Public Subkey Packet, containing an encryption subkey.This master key is the one used to produce a fingerprint a Public Key Packet, containing the primary signing and certifying key material ( i.e., in the RSA case, its modulus and public exponent).created with the default gpg -gen-key settings) is constituted of: You may not know this, but when you export your public key, you are actually exporting multiple PGP packets at once. Since PGP is based on an hybrid encryption scheme, each user generates (securely) her key pair first. They then reveal (thanks, for example, to a key server) their public key. In fact, it’s worth pointing out that the PGP public keys also contain the symmetric algorithm preferences of its owner, listing the symmetric schemes one would like to use! Public Keys So, what symmetric algorithm should we use when we send an email using PGP? The asymmetric algorithm is already defined by the key type: it’s typically RSA encryption, but there are multiple possibilities regarding the symmetric scheme used. This means that we end up with a very small overhead of typically less than 24Kb, way better than what I described in the previous paragraph. When we do asymmetric encryption nowadays, we actually use an hybrid cryptosystem, which encrypts the data with an efficient symmetric algorithm such as AES-256, and only encrypts the AES Data Encryption Key (DEK) of 256 bits using the multiple recipients public keys. This clearly reduces the desirability factor of asymmetric schemes. You would end up with around 40Mb of data to send by email, since each ciphertext is specifically made to be decrypted only by one private key and contains all the plaintext information. So you can obviously try to encrypt 4Mb of data for 10 recipients using only asymmetric cryptography, like the RSA cryptosystem, but then you’ll have the same data contained in 10 different ciphertexts. Now, what you actually want to do is to encrypt, send and decrypt the data efficiently, which is sadly not the main feature of asymmetric schemes. This is different to symmetric cryptography, which would require you to have a common, shared key in order to both encrypt and decrypt data. Since PGP allows you to easily encrypt data you intend to send to a given set of recipients, it naturally ends up using asymmetric cryptography.Īsymmetric cryptography is well suited for that task since it allows you to have a key pair (K public K secret), with one public component K public that anybody can use (typically to encrypt data for you, or verify data signed by you) and one secret component K secret that allows you to decrypt the data encrypted for its public counterpart or to sign data.

#Symantec encryption desktop pgp software#

In the rest of this article, “PGP” refers to the OpenPGP standard description – not the software nor the company. At the time of writing, I tried this all on Symantec Encryption Desktop version 10.4.1.

The most common PGP solution vendor is Symantec, which acquired the PGP Corporation in 2010, (see Wikipedia for a short history of PGP). It currently distributes and supports an OpenPGP-compliant software, originally called PGP Desktop, now known as Symantec Encryption Desktop.

#Symantec encryption desktop pgp professional#

Corporate Windows users generally use commercial software instead and get professional support from the vendor. Linux users generally rely on the free, open source software GnuPG, since it ships with most distributions. PGP has its very own standard for email encryption called OpenPGP and there are multiple OpenPGP solutions out there. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is the main way to send encrypted emails nowadays.

Let’s look at the details behind this observation. It is possible to advertise the use of Camellia in your PGP public keys through the “cipher preferences”, but if you do so, be aware that the official PGP software won’t currently allow your correspondent to encrypt mails or files for you. I recently discovered a problem that involves PGP and a symmetric cipher called Camellia.