Hello guys and welcome!
We’ll start talking about GNU Privacy Guard or GPG.
GnuPG is a cryptographic tool that helps you manage public and private keys as well as perform encryption
and decryption, both symmetric and asymmetric signing and verifying operations.
In my opinion GPG is the most popular cryptographic tool and offers the highest level of security.
If you want to encrypt a file and to be sure that no one will ever access it, GPG is your tool of
choice.
Of course this is debatable!
Note that gpg is not a cryptographic protocol but it implements the same cryptographic protocol as
everyone uses.
You’ll find sha-2 hash algorithms family, aes used for symmetric encryption or
rsa used for public key encryption; it's somehow similar to Open SSL just that its main purpose
is a little bit different.
GnuPG is an open source implementation of OpenPGP ( Pretty Good
Privacy ) standard as defined in RFC 4880.
Let's start with the installation! Depending on your platform,
you can install the GPG command line tool with the following commands. On macOS the easiest installation
is to use the popular package manager Homebrew. In a terminal you just type brew install gnupg; on Windows
you can find the GnuPG installer at this address: https://gpg4win.org/download.html In this example I'm gonna use Linux.
Most Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Kali Linux and so on
come with gpg already installed. But if it's necessary you can install it by executing sudo apt
install gnupg
On Kali Linux GNUPG is already the newest version; to get started and to make sure it is installed
correctly run gpg --help
It printed out the version number, supported encryption and hash algorithms and all the usage options.
You see, it's a very complex command. This will give you an overview of all the features of GPG! OK
I'll take a short break and in the next lectures we'll see how to encrypt a file using both symmetric
and asymmetric encryption.