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Pretty Good Privacy, an
encryption program that the US government tried to ban. Developed by Phil
Zimmerman in the early 1990s, pgp has become a byword for e-mail security.
It has also been the source of some controversy, following its international
distribution in defiance of an American ban on the export of strong
encryption software and its unauthorised use of the rsa algorithm.
Zimmerman sold pgp to Network Associates, a software company, in
1997. Its new owners exported the source code to the Netherlands in book
form, rather than as actual code, to circumvent US laws governing the export
of so-called munitions, and an international version is currently on sale.
Pgp is thus one of few programs whose international versions
are as secure as their US equivalents. |
