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PGP and GPG Differences

PGP and GPG Differences

Owned by Peter Wong
Last updated: Jan 31, 2019

See here for original source of this information.

PGP can refer to two things:

  1. The Pretty Good Privacy software originally written by Phil Zimmermann, and now owned by Symantec.
  2. The formats for keys, encrypted messages and message signatures defined by that software. These have now been formalized as the OpenPGP standard.
The GPG software is an independent implementation of the OpenPGP standards, so you can use it to exchange encrypted messages with people using other OpenPGP implementations (e.g. Symantec's PGP).
Due to its popularity on Linux systems, it is also fairly common for people to incorrectly use the term "GPG" to refer to the whole OpenPGP cryptography system (e.g. "GPG keys" or "GPG signatures"). It is usually pretty clear what they mean from the context though.