Version 1.5

About this FAQ

This comp.security.pgp FAQ is for the most part based on Jeff Licquia's original alt.security.pgp FAQ, which is unfortunately not available any longer. I welcome any comments, suggestions or additions for this FAQ. You can send them to faq-admin@mail.pgp.net.

What's new in version 1.5?

Text for question 3.19 has been updated to point out the danger of data from the swapfile ending up in things like MSWord documents.
Lots of bugs, typos and bad links fixed.

What's new in version 1.4?

pobox.com (no longer?) certifies PGP keys for their customers, so section 8.2 has been updated.
Jeffrey Schiller's post discussing PGP 5.0's faster key generation feature has replaced Viacrypt's statement on ITAR in appendix IV.
Question 1.7 now also links to the Linux beta of PGP 5.0.

Finding the FAQ

This FAQ is posted monthly to all comp.security.pgp newsgroups, and the latest version will always be available from the following locations:

http://www.pgp.net/pgpnet/pgp-faq/

Hypertext version, in tree form for easy browsing.

http://www.pgp.net/pgpnet/pgp-faq/faq.html (117 kilobytes)

Hypertext version, one document for offline reading.

http://www.pgp.net/pgpnet/pgp-faq/pgpfaq.txt (117 kilobytes)

Text version, one document.

http://www.iks-jena.de/mitarb/lutz/security/pgp/

German version of this FAQ.

http://www.isl.net.tw/~terry/pgp-faq/

Chinese version of this FAQ. Translated by Chen Tai-Wei <terry@ms1.hinet.net>.

http://members.tripod.com/~angriff/crypt/faq-index.html

Distribution

Distribution over electronic media is permitted, as long as the copyright notice at the bottom is left intact. If you want to make any changes, please let me know first.

Since this FAQ is available from the PGP network, there should be no problems getting access to it. That's why it is probably not necessary to mirror this FAQ elsewhere.

If you want to distribute this FAQ on a CD-ROM or similar medium, please contact me first (at faq-admin@mail.pgp.net). The same applies for offline distribution of the text-only version.

This FAQ was compiled with Orb v1.3 for OS/2, because maintaining such a large amount of information is impossible without a proper preprocessing and compiling tool. Orb, together with Lynx and a Makefile, allows me to easily maintain a consistent look throughout this FAQ, and to make sure that internal references stay correct. It also helps me to easily generate a hardcopy version of this FAQ, both in multi-part and one-part format.

Orb is a shareware HTML preprocessor which supports file inclusion, symbolic variables, conditional logic, and many other features useful in managing large websites. Orb is available for DOS, OS/2, and several flavors of Unix.

If you examine the source, you will see that this FAQ is written with several HTML 3 enhancements. Unlike Netscape extensions, these tags will not "hurt" anything on older browsers (like Netscape), and they will greatly improve the appearance on an HTML 3 capable browser. Additionally, a lot of the markup can be used to easily identify questions, answers, references and other things in the document.

[ Table of Contents | Glossary ]