GPG TOOLS GPG SUITE TUTORIAL INSTALL

On OSX/ OS Sierra you can use the free & open source GPG Suite to install the tools required to start encrypting email. This allows encrypted communication between both parties. Both sender & receiver need to set up a keypair & share their public keys with each other. This password allows you to unlock your keys & use them to encrypt your email. I won’t go into the technicals of it, if you are interested there are a lot of free resources which will guide you through the technology.Įncryption also requires a password to be set when creating your key pair. The keys are paired so that both are required to encrypt & decrypt emails. It is important that your private (secret) key always remains private & you never share it with anyone. Each user generates a pair of keys, one private key remains secret and on the user’s computer, the other, known as a public key is free to distribute on the internet and allows you to pass it on to those you wish to communicate with.

GPG is important for emails as it means that an email remains encrypted between the sender & the receiver. I Use RSA 4096 for my keys which is possibly a little overkill, but I like to future proof when learning. These keys use a high level of encryption. Both PGP and GPG are interchangeable so you can use either protocol. We will use GPG which stands for GNU Privacy Guard and is a compatible free software equivalent of Symantec’s proprietary encryption algorithm. As part of my cybersecurity posts I’ve decided to write briefly about PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption of email.

Gpg tools gpg suite tutorial