Pretty Good Privacy

1
Pretty Good Privacy

• Niket P. Kothari ltnpkothar_at_ecs.syr.edugt
• Bhumika K Mehta ltbmehta_at_ecs.syr.edugt
• CSE 691 Internet Security Principles
• Fall 2001- Interim Project Status Report

2
Project Description.

• Pretty Good Encryption (PGP) has been around
  for a while now. In this project we will analyze
  how the Pretty Good Privacy encryption works. We
  will study the encryption procedure as well as
  the use of Digital Signature. We will also study
  what other encryption systems are similar in
  performance and how seamless is PGP (and like
  encryption methods) integrated into e-mail
  programs.We will try to see whether these
  encryption systems are practical for streaming or
  high speed network data. We will attempt to
  present some Demos and examples .

3
Project Team Members and Role

• Niket P Kothari lt npkothar_at_ecs.syr.ed
  u gt
• Presentation
• Web Search
• Bhumika K Mehta lt bmehta_at_ecs.syr.edu gt
• Research
• Websearch
• Both of us are trying to explore the Downloaded
  PGP software.

4
Focus Area

• To analyze the working of PGP.
• Government policies regarding PGP.
• To study the format of PGP and X.509
  certificates.
• To study how PGP can be used in VPN environment.

5
Current Research Sources

• Link to some of the websites for general
  Information.
• http//www.mindspring.com/aegreene/pgp/
• http//www.faqs.org/faqs/pgp-faq/part1/
• http//www.pgpi.org/
• http//www.pgpi.org/doc/pgpintro/p11
• Link to the site for Downloading the PGP
  software.
• http//pgpdist.mit.edu/distserver/zz341524989/ne
  wpgp/index.html

6
Some more Research

• Book Referred
• Pretty good Privacy - Simson Garfinkel
• Papers on Pretty Good Privacy.
• A white paper on the reconstruction of the PGP
  cryptography keys.
• A Paper on PGP Security Features and Message
  Preparation .

7
Successful Progress So Far

• Web Searches
• Reading articles/WhitePapers related to Pretty
  Good Privacy.
• Compilation and organization of the information
  collected so far.
• Downloaded the MIT PGP 6.5.8, the current
  "official" freeware version .

8
Main Bottlenecks

• Need to have a strong knowledge of Statistics in
  order to understand the encryption algorithm .
• Unable to install the downloaded software on the
  machines in the schools computer clusters.

9
Final Mission.

• To get the in-depth technical knowledge in the
  working of PGP encryption.
• To be able to run the downloaded software and try
  some examples using PGP.
• To study the key reconstruction process for PGP
  cryptographic keys.

10
Conclusion

• Thus the goal of introducing PGP and how it uses
  cryptography to encrypt the messages
• for a secure transmission is understood and
  further will be implemented using the PGP
  software .