The GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) is GNU's tool for secure communication and data storage. It is a complete and free replacement of PGP and can be used to encrypt data and to create digital signatures. It includes an advanced key management facility and is compliant with the proposed OpenPGP Internet standard as described in RFC2440.

Version 1.0.7 has been released on April 30th and is available at most
mirrors. This new release has a lot of features beyond OpenPGP which will be included in a soon to be published RFC2440 successor.

Some new things in this version:

• Secret keys are now stored and exported in a new format which uses SHA-1 for integrity checks. This format renders the Rosa/Klima attack useless. Other OpenPGP implementations might not yet support this, so the option --simple-sk-checksum creates the old vulnerable format.


• The default cipher algorithm for encryption is now CAST5, default hash algorithm is SHA-1. This will give us better interoperability with other OpenPGP implementations.


• Symmetric encrypted messages now use a fixed file size if possible. This is a tradeoff: it breaks PGP 5, but fixes PGP 2, 6, and 7.

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Comment:

"Using GnuPG" is an article written by Vincent Danen for MandrakeSecure web site. It provides information on installing and using GnuPG.