Whatever happened to PGP?
PGP is often thought of as an encryption system, but your private key is a digital signature that can prove who your message comes from, as well as showing that it hasn’t been tampered with.
The reason a Public Key Infrastructure doesn’t look like a widespread identity system is that it needs a web of trust; if somebody you know has signed my PGP key, then you take their word that I am who I say I am. That works well for close groups of friends – or for the corporations and government departments around the world who rely on PKIs based on the commercial PGP offerings or the OpenPGP SDK that’s now available. That’s where PGP has really made its mark, says Jon Callas (now the CTO of PGP Corporation; and part of the team that shepherded the commercial side of PGP out of the wilderness where Network Associates left it). “We thought it would be a grass roots system.
