GNU Privacy Guard

GNU Privacy Guard

Original author(s)	Werner Koch
Developer(s)	GNU Project
Initial release	7 September 1999 (1999-09-07)[1]
Stable release(s) [±]
Modern 2.1.23 / August 9, 2017 (2017-08-09)[2] Stable 2.0.30 / March 31, 2016 (2016-03-31)[3] Classic 1.4.22 / July 19, 2017 (2017-07-19)[4]
Preview release(s) [±]
Repository	git.gnupg.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi
Written in	C
Operating system	Microsoft Windows, macOS, RISC OS, Android, Linux
Type	OpenPGP
License	GNU GPLv3
Website	gnupg.org

GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG) is a free software replacement for Symantec's PGP cryptographic software suite.^[5] GnuPG is compliant with RFC 4880, which is the IETF standards track specification of OpenPGP. Modern versions of PGP and Veridis' Filecrypt are interoperable with GnuPG and other OpenPGP-compliant systems.

GnuPG is part of the GNU Project, and has received major funding from the German government.^[6]

Overview

GnuPG is a hybrid-encryption software program because it uses a combination of conventional symmetric-key cryptography for speed, and public-key cryptography for ease of secure key exchange, typically by using the recipient's public key to encrypt a session key which is only used once. This mode of operation is part of the OpenPGP standard and has been part of PGP from its first version.

The GnuPG 1.x series uses an integrated cryptographic library, while the GnuPG 2.x series replaces this with Libgcrypt.

GnuPG encrypts messages using asymmetric key pairs individually generated by GnuPG users. The resulting public keys may be exchanged with other users in a variety of ways, such as Internet key servers. They must always be exchanged carefully to prevent identity spoofing by corrupting public key ↔ "owner" identity correspondences. It is also possible to add a cryptographic digital signature to a message, so the message integrity and sender can be verified, if a particular correspondence relied upon has not been corrupted.

GnuPG also supports symmetric encryption algorithms. By default, GnuPG uses the CAST5 symmetrical algorithm. GnuPG does not use patented or otherwise restricted software or algorithms. Instead, GnuPG uses a variety of other, non-patented algorithms.^[7]

For a long time it did not support the IDEA encryption algorithm used in PGP. It was in fact possible to use IDEA in GnuPG by downloading a plugin for it, however this might require a license for some uses in countries in which IDEA was patented. Starting with versions 1.4.13 and 2.0.20, GnuPG supports IDEA because the last patent of IDEA expired in 2012. Support of IDEA is intended "to get rid of all the questions from folks either trying to decrypt old data or migrating keys from PGP to GnuPG",^[8] and hence is not recommended for regular use.

As of versions 2.0.26 and 1.4.18, GnuPG supports the following algorithms:

Public key

RSA, ElGamal, DSA

Cipher

3DES, IDEA (since versions 1.4.13 and 2.0.20), CAST5, Blowfish, Twofish, AES-128, AES-192, AES-256, Camellia-128, -192 and -256 (since versions 1.4.10 and 2.0.12)

Hash

MD5, SHA-1, RIPEMD-160, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512, SHA-224

Compression

Uncompressed, ZIP, ZLIB, BZIP2

More recent releases of GnuPG 2.x ("stable" and "modern" series) expose most cryptographic functions and algorithms Libgcrypt (its cryptographic library) provides, including support for elliptic curve cryptography (ECDSA, ECDH and EdDSA)^[9] in the "modern" series (i.e. since GnuPG 2.1).

History

GnuPG was initially developed by Werner Koch.^[10][11] Version 1.0.0, which was the first production version, was released on September 7, 1999, almost two years after the first GnuPG release (version 0.0.0).^[1][10] The German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology funded the documentation and the port to Microsoft Windows in 2000.^[11]

GnuPG is a system compliant to the OpenPGP standard, thus the history of OpenPGP is of importance; it was designed to interoperate with PGP, the email encryption program initially designed and developed by Phil Zimmermann.^[12][13]

On February 7, 2014, a GnuPG crowdfunding effort closed, raising €36,732 for a new Web site and infrastructure improvements.^[14]

Branches

As of August 2016, there are three actively maintained branches of GnuPG:

• "Stable" (2.0), stable version for general use, initially released on November 13, 2006.^[15] This branch is announced to reach end-of-life December 31, 2017.^[16]
• "Modern" (2.1), containing the latest developments, with numerous new features, such as elliptic curve cryptography; it will replace the "stable" (2.0) branch at the end of 2017. It was initially released on November 6, 2014.^[9]
• "Classic" (1.4), older standalone version, most suitable for older or embedded platforms. Initially released on December 16, 2004.^[17]

"Modern" (2.1) and "stable" (2.0) cannot be installed at the same time. However, it is possible to install "classic" (1.4) along with any GnuPG 2.x (i.e. "modern" or "stable") version.^[9]

Before the release of GnuPG 2.0, all releases originated from a single branch; i.e., before November 13, 2006 no multiple release branches were maintained in parallel. These former, sequentially succeeding (up to 1.4) release branches were:

• 1.2 branch, initially released on September 22, 2002,^[18] with 1.2.6 as the last version, released on October 26, 2004.^[19]
• 1.0 branch, initially released on September 7, 1999,^[1] with 1.0.7 as the last version, released on April 30, 2002.^[20]

Platforms

Although the basic GnuPG program has a command-line interface, there exist various front-ends that provide it with a graphical user interface. For example, GnuPG encryption support has been integrated into KMail and Evolution, the graphical email clients found in KDE and GNOME, the most popular Linux desktops. There are also graphical GnuPG front-ends, for example Seahorse for GNOME and KGPG for KDE. For the macOS, the MacGPG project provides a number of Aqua front-ends for OS integration of encryption and key management as well as GnuPG installations via Installer packages.^[21]

Furthermore, the GPGTools Installer^[22] installs all related OpenPGP applications (GPG Keychain Access), plugins (GPGMail) and dependencies (MacGPG) to use GnuPG based encryption. Instant messaging applications such as Psi and Fire can automatically secure messages when GnuPG is installed and configured. Web-based software such as Horde also makes use of it. The cross-platform extension Enigmail provides GnuPG support for Mozilla Thunderbird and SeaMonkey. Similarly, Enigform provides GnuPG support for Mozilla Firefox. FireGPG was discontinued June 7, 2010.^[23]

In 2005, g10 Code GmbH and Intevation GmbH released Gpg4win, a software suite that includes GnuPG for Windows, GNU Privacy Assistant, and GnuPG plug-ins for Windows Explorer and Outlook. These tools are wrapped in a standard Windows installer, making it easier for GnuPG to be installed and used on Windows systems.

Limitations

As a command-line-based system, GnuPG 1.x is not written as an API that may be incorporated into other software. To overcome this, GPGME (abbreviated from GnuPG Made Easy) was created as an API wrapper around GnuPG that parses the output of GnuPG and provides a stable and maintainable API between the components.^[24] This currently requires an out-of-process call to the GnuPG executable for many GPGME API calls; as a result, possible security problems in an application do not propagate to the actual crypto code due to the process barrier. Various graphical front-ends based on GPGME have been created.

Since GnuPG 2.0, many of GnuPG's functions are available directly as C APIs in Libgcrypt.^[25]

Vulnerabilities

The OpenPGP standard specifies several methods of digitally signing messages. In 2003, due to an error in a change to GnuPG intended to make one of those methods more efficient, a security vulnerability was introduced.^[26] It affected only one method of digitally signing messages, only for some releases of GnuPG (1.0.2 through 1.2.3), and there were fewer than 1000 such keys listed on the key servers.^[27] Most people did not use this method, and were in any case discouraged from doing so, so the damage caused (if any, since none has been publicly reported) would appear to have been minimal. Support for this method has been removed from GnuPG versions released after this discovery (1.2.4 and later).

Two further vulnerabilities were discovered in early 2006; the first being that scripted uses of GnuPG for signature verification may result in false positives,^[28] the second that non-MIME messages were vulnerable to the injection of data which while not covered by the digital signature, would be reported as being part of the signed message.^[29] In both cases updated versions of GnuPG were made available at the time of the announcement.

In June 2017, a vulnerability (CVE-2017-7526) was discovered in libgcrypt, a library used by GnuPG, which enabled a full key recovery for RSA-1024 and 1/8th of RSA-2048 keys. This side-channel attack exploits the fact that Libgcrypt used a sliding windows method for exponentiation which leads to the leakage of exponent bits and to full key recovery.^[30][31]

Application support

Notable applications, front ends and browser extensions that support GPG include the following:

In popular culture

In May 2014, The Washington Post reported on a 12-minute video guide "GPG for Journalists" posted to Vimeo in January 2013^[32] by a user named anon108. The Post identified anon108 as fugitive NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who it said made the tutorial — "narrated by a digitally disguised voice whose speech patterns sound similar to those of Snowden" — to teach journalist Glenn Greenwald email encryption. Greenwald said that he could not confirm the authorship of the video.^[33]

See also

References

External links

• Official website
• A Short History of the GNU Privacy Guard, written by Werner Koch, published on GnuPG's 10th birthday