E-MAIL SECURITY- When an e-mail message is sent between two distant sites, it will generally transit dozens of machines on the way. Any of these can read and record the message for future use. In practice, privacy is nonexistent, despite what many people think. Nevertheless, many people would like to be able to send e-mail that can read by the intended recipient and no one else. This desire has stimulated several people and groups to apply the cryptographic principles. There are widely used secure e-mail systems, PGP.
PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) – PGP is a complete e-mail security package that provides privacy, authentication, digital signature and compression. Furthermore, the complete package, including all the sources code, is distributed free of charge via the internet. Due to its quality, price (zero), and easy availability on UNIX, Linux, Windows, and Mac Os platforms, it is widely used to day.
PGP encrypts data by using a block cipher called IDEA (International Data Encryption Algorithm), which uses 128-bitkeys. PGP supports text comparison, secrecy and digital signature and also provides extensive key management facilities, but oddly enough, not e-mail facilities. It is more of a preprocessor that takes plain text as input and produced signed cipher text in base64 as output. This output can then be e-mailed, of course. Some PGP implements call a user agent as the final step to actually send the message.
PGP supports four RSA key lengths. It is up to the user to select the one that is most appropriate. The length are-
1-Casual (384 bits): Can be broken easily today.
2-Commercial (512 bits): Breakable by three-letter organization.
3-Military (1024 bits): Not breakable by any one on earth.
4-Alicn (2048 bits): Not breakable by any one on other planet, either.
Since RSA is only used for two small computations, everyone should use Alien strength keys all the time.
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