PGP combines the convenience of the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) public key cryptosystem with the speed of conventional cryptography, message digests for digital signatures, data compression before encryption, good ergonomic design, and sophisticated key management. And PGP performs the public-key functions faster than most other software implementations. PGP is public key cryptography for the masses.
Perhaps you think your E-mail is legitimate enough that encryption is unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don't you always send your paper mail on postcards? Why not submit to drug testing on demand? Why require a warrant for police searches of your house? Are you trying to hide something? You must be a subversive or a drug dealer if you hide your mail inside envelopes. Or maybe a paranoid nut. Do law-abiding citizens have any need to encrypt their E-mail?
What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? [Everyone would have hear about the 'Birthing cloth' and Naomi a lot sooner!] If some brave soul tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he's hiding. Fortunately, we don't live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting their privacy with an envelope. There's safety in numbers. Analogously, it would be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their E-mail, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their E-mail privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity.
Today, if the Government wants to violate the privacy of ordinary citizens, it has to expend a certain amount of expense and labor to intercept and steam open and read paper mail, and listen to and possibly transcribe spoken telephone conversation. This kind of labor-intensive monitoring is not practical on a large scale. This is only done in important cases when it seems worthwhile.
More and more of our private communications are being routed through electronic channels. Electronic mail is gradually replacing conventional paper mail. E-mail messages are just too easy to intercept and scan for interesting keywords. This can be done easily, routinely, automatically, and undetectable on a grand scale. International cablegrams are already scanned this way on a large scale by the NSA.
We are moving toward a future when the nation will be crisscrossed with high capacity fiber optic data networks linking together all our increasingly ubiquitous personal computers. E-mail will be the norm for everyone, not the novelty it is today. The Government will protect our E-mail with Government-designed encryption protocols. Probably most people will acquiesce to that. But perhaps some people will prefer their own protective measures.
Senate Bill 266, a 1991 omnibus anti-crime bill, had an unsettling measure buried in it. If this non-binding resolution had become real law, it would have forced manufacturers of secure communications equipment to insert special "trap doors" in their products, so that the Government can read anyone's encrypted messages. It reads: "It is the sense of Congress that providers of electronic communications services and manufacturers of electronic communications service equipment shall insure that communications systems permit the Government to obtain the plain text contents of voice, data, and other communications when appropriately authorized by law." This measure was defeated after rigorous protest from civil libertarians and industry groups.
In 1992, the FBI Digital Telephony wiretap proposal was introduced to Congress. It would require all manufacturers of communications equipment to build in special remote wiretap ports that would enable the FBI to remotely wiretap all forms of electronic communication from FBI offices. Although it never attracted any sponsors in Congress in 1992 because of citizen opposition, it was reintroduced in 1994.
Most alarming of all is the White House's bold new encryption policy initiative, under development at NSA since the start of the Bush administration, and unveiled April 16th, 1993. The centerpiece of this initiative is a Government-built encryption device, called the "Clipper" chip, containing a new classified NSA encryption algorithm. The Government is encouraging private industry to design it into all their secure communication products, like secure phones, secure FAX, etc. AT&T is now putting the Clipper into their secure voice products. The catch: At the time of manufacture, each Clipper chip will be loaded with its own unique key, and the Government gets to keep a copy, placed in escrow. Not to worry, though-- the Government promises that they will use these keys to read your traffic only when duly authorized by law. Of course, to make Clipper completely effective, the next logical step would be to outlaw other forms of cryptography.
If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy. Intelligence agencies have access to good cryptographic technology. So do the big arms and drug traffickers. So do defense contractors, oil companies, and other corporate giants. But ordinary people and grassroots political organizations mostly have not had access to affordable "military grade" public-key cryptographic technology. Until now. PGP empowers people to take their privacy into their own hands. There's a growing social need for it.
First, some elementary terminology. Suppose I want to send you a message, but I don't want anyone but you to be able to read it. I can "encrypt", or "encipher" the message, which means I scramble it up in a hopelessly complicated way, rendering it unreadable to anyone except you, the intended recipient of the message. I supply a cryptographic "key" to encrypt the message, and you have to use the same key to decipher or "decrypt" it. At least that's how it works in conventional "single-key" cryptosystems.
In conventional cryptosystems, such as the US Federal Data Encryption Standard (DES), a single key is used for both encryption and decryption. This means that a key must be initially transmitted via secure channels so that both parties can know it before encrypted messages can be sent over insecure channels. This may be inconvenient. If you have a secure channel for exchanging keys, then why do you need cryptography in the first place? In public key cryptosystems, everyone has two related complementary keys, a publicly revealed key and a secret key. Each key unlocks the code that the other key makes. Knowing the public key does not help you deduce the corresponding secret key. The public key can be published and widely disseminated across a communications network. This protocol provides privacy without the need for the same kind of secure channels that a conventional cryptosystem requires.
Anyone can use a recipient's public key to encrypt a message to that person, and that recipient uses her own corresponding secret key to decrypt that message. No one but the recipient can decrypt it, because no one else has access to that secret key. Not even the person who encrypted the message can decrypt it.
Message authentication is also provided. The sender's own secret key can be used to encrypt a message, thereby "signing" it. This creates a digital signature of a message, which the recipient (or anyone else) can check by using the sender's public key to decrypt it. This proves that the sender was the true originator of the message, and that the message has not been subsequently altered by anyone else, because the sender alone possesses the secret key that made that signature. Forgery of a signed message is infeasible, and the sender cannot later disavow his signature.
These two processes can be combined to provide both privacy and authentication by first signing a message with your own secret key, then encrypting the signed message with the recipient's public key. The recipient reverses these steps by first decrypting the message with her own secret key, then checking the enclosed signature with your public key. These steps are done automatically by the recipient's software.
Public keys are kept in individual "key certificates" that include the key owner's user ID (which is that person's name), a timestamp of when the key pair was generated, and the actual key material. Public key certificates contain the public key material, while secret key certificates contain the secret key material. Each secret key is also encrypted with its own password, in case it gets stolen. A key file, or "key ring" contains one or more of these key certificates. Public key rings contain public key certificates, and secret key rings contain secret key certificates.
The keys are also internally referenced by a "key ID", which is an "abbreviation" of the public key (the least significant 64 bits of the large public key). When this key ID is displayed, only the lower 32 bits are shown for further brevity. While many keys may share the same user ID, for all practical purposes no two keys share the same key ID.
PGP uses "message digests" to form signatures. A message digest is a 128-bit cryptographically strong one-way hash function of the message. It is somewhat analogous to a "checksum" or CRC error checking code, in that it compactly "represents" the message and is used to detect changes in the message. Unlike a CRC, however, it is computationally infeasible for an attacker to devise a substitute message that would produce an identical message digest. The message digest gets encrypted by the secret key to form a signature.
Documents are signed by prefixing them with signature certificates, which contain the key ID of the key that was used to sign it, a secret-key-signed message digest of the document, and a timestamp of when the signature was made. The key ID is used by the receiver to look up the sender's public key to check the signature. The receiver's software automatically looks up the sender's public key and user ID in the receiver's public key ring.
Encrypted files are prefixed by the key ID of the public key used to encrypt them. The receiver uses this key ID message prefix to look up the secret key needed to decrypt the message. The receiver's software automatically looks up the necessary secret decryption key in the receiver's secret key ring.
These two types of key rings are the principal method of storing and managing public and secret keys. Rather than keep individual keys in separate key files, they are collected in key rings to facilitate the automatic lookup of keys either by key ID or by user ID. Each user keeps his own pair of key rings. An individual public key is temporarily kept in a separate file long enough to send to your friend who will then add it to her key ring.
Telnet to net-dist.mit.edu, log in as getpgp, answer the questions, then ftp to net-dist.mit.edu and change to the hidden directory named in the telnet session to get your own copy.
MIT-PGP is for U. S. and Canadian use only, but MIT is only distributing it within the USA (due to some archaic export control laws).
Custom versions of cryptography and authentication products and public key implementations such as the NIST DSS are available from Zimmermann, as well as custom product development services. His consulting firm's address is:
Boulder Software Engineering 3021 Eleventh Street Boulder, Colorado 80304 USA Phone: 303-541-0140 (10:00am - 7:00pm Mountain Time) Fax: arrange by phone Internet: prz@acm.org
Last Updated 04/13/95.© 1996 PPSA Consulting
Webmaster@cybermaze.com