GNU Privacy Guard (
GnuPG or
GPG) is a
free software alternative to the
PGP suite of
cryptographic software. GnuPG is compliant with
RFC 4880, which is the current
IETF standards track specification of
OpenPGP. Current versions of PGP (and Veridis' Filecrypt) are interoperable with GnuPG and other OpenPGP-compliant systems.
GPG is a part of the Free Software Foundation's GNU software project, and has received major funding from the German government. It is released under the terms of version 3 of the GNU General Public License.
GnuPG was initially developed by Werner Koch. Version 1.0.0 was released on September 7, 1999. The German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology funded the documentation and the port to Microsoft Windows in 2000.
Because GnuPG is an OpenPGP standard compliant system, the history of OpenPGP is of importance. It was designed to interoperate with PGP, the email encryption protocol developed by Phil Zimmermann.
