PGP on shaky ground

The standard for Web encryption programs is being abandoned by its vendor, leaving plenty of questions and problems for users.

By Deborah Radcliff

July 22, 2002 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - Bad things do happen to good code. So learned Phil Zimmermann, author of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), which in the early 1990s became the de facto standard for cryptology development on the Internet, according to analysts and user groups.
While working with human rights advocates in 1991, Zimmermann released his powerful encryption, signing and authentication freeware, which did away with the need for third-party key authorities to issue and manage the keys that lock and unlock data.
In fact, the mathematical encryption algorithm was so good that Zimmermann nearly went to jail after one of his associates posted the algorithm's source code on the Web and it caught the attention of the U.S. Customs Service. The federal government wasn't happy that such a powerful secrecy tool had become available to anyone who wanted it and had the technical skills to use the complex program. It took a three-year legal battle before Zimmermann was eventually cleared of violating the International Traffic in Arms Regulations for exporting munitions.


Phil Zimmermann, author of Pretty Good Privacy

Two years ago, after an unsuccessful attempt to make money on PGP on his own, Zimmermann sold PGP to Network Associates Inc. (NAI) in Santa Clara, Calif. NAI tried to integrate and market PGP as part of an all-in-one firewall, virtual private network and peer-to-peer encryption appliance but was unable to sell the product, says Ryan McGee, group product manager at McAfee Security, a division of NAI. Nor could the company find another vendor to buy PGP. So in February, it pulled support for the product (see story).
"As Network Associates drops PGP, it drops the ease of use and high level of integration PGP achieved in the desktop computing environment," says Julian Koh, a network engineer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who uses PGP for file and mail encryption inside Northwestern's network. "They've also dropped support for that product. So if someone's using the latest version of PGP on XP and they install a Microsoft service pack for XP, it could break their PGP. And there's not going to be any update from Network Associates to patch PGP."
Because of PGP's history as free software, the number of companies that have installed it is unknown. But large organizations such as Lockheed Martin Corp. use PGP on a limited basis for critical communications and file encryption, according to a spokesperson at the Bethesda, Md.-based company. And PGP is also being used in a lot of Web site scripting, says Adam Back, a security consultant in Montreal who

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