now, pgp is one of the more important topics when it comes to cybersecurity, anonymity or privacy online.
pgp is sort of a set of tools and methodologies and software that allows you to encrypt communications securely.
it is not a specific type of encryption algorithm or cipher.
instead, it's a suite of software used to actually go about encrypting and decrypting files, folders, messages, and even signing things securely.
so throughout the encryption course, we learn a lot about pgp and how to actually use it.
but for now, it's good to understand the basics of what pgp is.
pgp stands for pretty good privacy and was invented back in the nineties as a set of standards and programs where you could use these sort of encryption methods to encrypt and decrypt things securely.
it's again, it's more of an encryption program.
it's not a standalone way to encrypt.
it uses both asymmetric and symmetric key methods and includes the ability for hashing and signing and validation, key importing and exporting, key publishing for sharing it right to the internet.
it has a lot of great things built into it that we'll come to learn about throughout this course.
and it's important to note that when you're doing things like creating a key, you can actually choose the different ways you want to create that sort of key.
so an example screenshot here from cleopatra, we're creating a new key and we can actually select the method of encryption type we want for the key.
do we want to use rsa or dsa or ecdsa?
do we want the certificate to be able to be used for signing, authentication?
how long do we want the certificate to be valid?
all of these are available in a tool called cleopatra, which is a tool we'll use later in this course.
so the most basic example of pgp would be a sort of asymmetric encryption flow where you have a message like this that somebody wants to send me, for example, they want to send me their email address, but they want to make sure it's secure.
in this case, i would need to have a public and private key and they would take my public key or i could send them my public key and then they would encrypt the message they want with my public key.
then all i would need to do is take my private key with that message and i can decrypt the message to find out what it means.
so before they send the message, they take my public key, they encrypt the message with my public key, and then they send that message to me.
and then once i receive the message, i can take my private key and decrypt the message to read it again.
it's a very basic flow, very easy to understand public key for encrypting.
if they want to send it to you and private key for decrypting.
if i wanted to send a message back to the person who sent me this message, i would need their public key to then encrypt my return message back to them, which they would then use their private key to decrypt that message.
again, this is just the fundamentals of pgp.
we'll keep diving in more as we learn about how to use pgp and especially when it comes to the different types of keys, how to create keys and all of that.
so continue on to learn more about that.