PGP & GPG: Email for the Practical Paranoid Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)This really is a terrific book if you're at all interested in learning how to secure information. It's very well-written in a clear, *concise* manner.
Two great introductory chapters lay out the fundamentals of cryptography and OpenPGP in plain English. There's nice coverage on terminology, the differences between OpenPGP/PGP/GPG, and the basics of using them.
The first chapter has also got a terrific chart laying out specific actions for things you want to do with your messages, like "I want to send a message that only my intended recipient can read" which is answered by "Encrypt the message with the recipient's public key." Much of the rest of the book follows this same clear vein as the author moves through the details of implementing PGP/GPG.
The book is full of small tidbits of very useful information, such as considerations for selecting expiration periods for your keys, or how to decide on what levels of trust to give family and friends, or even how to increase your paranoia by worrying about whether or not a hardware keystroke probe is monitoring your passphrase as you enter it.
The sections covering implementation of GPG are particularly well done. GPG isn't the easiest thing to work with, but Lucas does a great job of pointing out potential pitfalls and working readers past the rough spots.
A terrific work that lays out lots of good information in a small, well-written package.

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OpenPGP is the most widely used email encryption standard in the world. It is based on PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) as originally developed by Phil Zimmermann. The OpenPGP protocol defines standard formats for encrypted messages, signatures, and certificates for exchanging public keys.

PGP & GPG is an easy-to read, informal tutorial for implementing electronic privacy on the cheap using the standard tools of the email privacy field - commercial PGP and non-commercial GnuPG (GPG). The book shows how to integrate these OpenPGP implementations into the most common email clients and how to use PGP and GPG in daily email correspondence to both send and receive encrypted email.

The PGP & GPG book is written for the moderately skilled computer user who is unfamiliar with public key cryptography but who is nevertheless interested in guarding their email privacy. Lucas's trademark informal and relaxed tone makes public key cryptography as simple and clear as possible, so that any reasonably savvy computer user can understand it.

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