P. J. Ponder wrote:
On Tue, 5 Nov 1996, Edward R. Figueroa wrote:
I'm a new Cyberpunk! Last, I would like to know once and for all, is PGP compromised, is there a back door, and have we been fooled by NSA to believe it's secure?
As far as anyone knows that has publicly commented on it, PGP is presumed to be secure against known attacks. By making the source code available, and basing the encryption on published methods - RSA and IDEA, PGP has been reviewed extensively by the world's experts on crypto, and those experts that publish their results have said there is no known easy way to crack it. There are, of course, many experts who do not publish their results - for instance, cryptographers who work for intelligence gathering agencies. What they have found out about RSA and IDEA the rest of us don't know. There are efforts underway to prove mathematically how hard it is to break the sort of encryption that PGP is based on.
[snippo] Just to make it easy for you: PGP will keep out your snoopy neighbors on the net, but if you're betting it will lock out the government, you're probably peeing up the proverbial rope.