Description

This article is from the PGP mini FAQ, by Andre Bacard abacard@well.sf.ca.us with numerous contributions by others.

02 Who created PGP?

Philip Zimmermann <prz@acm.org> wrote the initial
program. Phil, a a hero to many pro-privacy activists,
works as a computer security consultant in Boulder,
Colorado. Phil Zimmermann, Peter Gutmann, Hal Finney,
Branko Lankester and other programmers around the globe
have created subsequent PGP versions and shells.

PGP uses the RSA public-key encryption system. RSA was
announced in 1977 by its inventors: Ronald Rivest of MIT,
Adi Shamir of the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and
Leonard Adelman of USC. It is called "RSA" after the
initials of these men. PGP also employs an encryption
system called IDEA which surfaced in 1990 due to Xuejia
Lai and James Massey's inventiveness.

 

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• prev: 01 What is PGP?
• Index
• next: 03 Who uses PGP encryption [or other RSA-based systems]?

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security, PGP, nontechnical, overview