This is part of a series on GNU Privacy Guard:

  1. Getting Started with GNU Privacy Guard (this post)
  2. Generating More Secure GPG Keys: Rationale
  3. Generating More Secure GPG Keys: A Step-by-Step Guide
  4. Using an OpenPGP Smartcard with GnuPG

Like many others, I have recently taken a more active interest in information security. In particular, I have taken a fresh look at GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG). This popular open-source encryption tool offers users the ability to encrypt and sign data and communications using public key cryptography.

I’ve used GPG in the past, but now that I’ve read up on it a little more, I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned. This post won’t get into the relative merits of RSA, DSA, or ECC keys, or extra measures you can take to keep your private key secure. I hope to cover those things in more detail later.

This post is intended to serve as a brief introduction to GPG and should also help to clear up some confusing vocabulary to make further reading more fruitful.

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