Customer Reviews

PGP: Pretty Good Privacy

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The first half of "PGP: Pretty Good Privacy" is devoted to cryptography basics and the history behind PGP. It's certainly interesting reading, especially seeing how the relationships among the players developed. If you're interested in this background, then this book is for you.

The second half explains PGP usage and where you can find it online. Unfortunately, a lot of this seems dated -- however, to be fair, the book is over five years old. You'll probably be better off with another resource such as the included documentation.

My usual rule is to buy anything published by O'Reilly--it's always worth it. Not this time.

Garfinkel's book is extremely basic. It covers the same ground as the PGP documentation, but not as well. Worse, it's badly out of date by now.

A much better bet is to read the online documentation for GnuPG, the free PGP clone, at www.gnupg.org. If you use UNIX, you should use GPG instead of PGP anyway: PGP has a wonderful interface under Windows, but has really stagnated for UNIX users.

PGP is a fascinating tool. Most see PGP as a way of sharing files, but the creator of PGP, Phil Zimmerman, really want to make a *privacy* tool. I did not realize this and other things until reading this book.

O'Reilly's PGP book can be divided into two sections. The first section is really a history of cryptography and how PGP fits in this context. I found this section surprisingly enjoyable as you learn about the long and tortuous struggle between the NSA and people who want to promote freedom and privacy. On a more concrete level though, you do learn quite a bit about different encryption algorithms and key algorithms, such as the RSA and Diffie-Hellman as well as other concepts important to cryptography. Admittedly, the history itself makes for pretty interesting reading.

The second section is about PGP usage, and it is very thorough in its coverage. You will learn just about every possible feature in PGP, and how to apply them to a number of possible situations. I like reading this book over the PGP manuals just for the time and care put into it, if not the amusing examples.

One thing other reviewers have rightly touched on is the age of the book. TIme has passed. The RSA algorithm is now free and open, and PGP clone called GPG is now in wide use. I am definitely excited to see a 2nd edition of this book in hopes that it will cover such things.

However, regardless of the age, this book is an excellent primer into PGP and cryptography culture, and newbies like me will certain enjoy reading it.

This book gives an excellent account of how encryption came into the hands of non-spooks (and I don't mean Clipper). But what really matters is the legacy information on how encryption works. This information hasn't changed since. It also gives the reader a solid base of understanding of what PGP is doing when you use it.

The book is also quite simple to read, so much so that I felt guilty for "studying" a book that was so easy that I could blow through a chapter in twenty minutes. One final note of importance is that because the book is old (94), it is UNIX-centric, which is quite refreshing in today's environment of applications written exclusively for Windoze.

Having read a poor review of this book on Amazon, I was a little reluctant to purchase. However, it appears that the addage of "one mans meat is another mans poisen" holds true here. Perhaps it is because I am new to pgp, but I really enjoyed the history portion of the book. I also found the descriptive part of this book to be exactly the information I needed to start putting pgp to good use. Without hesitation, I would recommend this book.

Several of these reviews are critical of the book, but they do not point out that the creator of PGP, Phil Zimmerman, was under investigation by the U.S Attorney General's office at the time that this book was published. Give these guys a break, if it weren't for PGP, we would probably not have a cheap way to encrypt email today.

Overall a good history of PGP. Does not cover the recent developements since PGP was aquired by Network Associates. The current version 6.51 offers a certificate server, PKI server, VPN and encrypted disk utility. Needs to be updated.

Mr. Garfinkel does a good job of introducing the beginning computer user to the complex subject of cryptography as it relates to PGP and it does a good job of explaining the basics behind public key cryptography. If you are someone who downloaded PGP because you heard it was controversial and wanted to see what it was all about but don't have a clue how to use it--even after reading the documentation that comes with the program--this book is for you. However, if you know anything about cryptography and PGP don't waste your money, you will get more detail from the PGP documentation in the zipped file. This book does not give details on how to set up a secure cryptosystem and indeed if you intend to keep secrets from anyone but your little sister you need more information than Mr. Garfinkel provides. I got the idea from reading the book that Mr. Garfinkel was regurgitating information that could be found elsewhere--the PGP documentation--and putting into easy-to-understand language while glossing over the foundations and purposes of the basic commands. Also, it seemed that the book "came short" and had to be beefed up with the history of PGP and the RSA algorithm as the first 145 pages of this book are devoted to this and the actual instructions on how to use PGP consist of pages 145-276. (Do the math, I think he was adding to a weak writing. Even the documentation that came with PGP was longer than this.) The author's idea for escrowing encryption keys was ridiculous at best and completely insecure. He recommended writing them down and putting them in an envelope. One should not bother using encryption if this is the way that he protects himself from a forgotten encryption key. As far as I am concerned you would do better to read anything else. Don't buy this book! Everything that you need to use PGP is in the zip file that you downloaded. If you need handholding badly enough to need this book then using a powerful program like PGP could cause you more problems that it would solve

PGP: Pretty Good Privacy
Simson Garfinkel
ISBN: 1-56592-098-8

Although out-of-print and out-of-date by technology standards,
I decided to read this book to get a perspective of security from the point of view of the 1990's. I found the book to be an excellent historical reference. Obviously, the author did not originally write the book as a history lesson, but because PGP and encryption in general have advanced the book now appears this way.

For those interested in the history of computer technology, this book is fun and although out-of-print, fairly easy to acquire.

The book is well-written and easy to read.

I recommend O'Reilly's "PGP and GPG" for those looking for a modern reference on using PGP in a practical setting.

If you want to learn how to use PGP from a UNIX command line, this is the book for you. If you want to know the history of encryption and the development of PGP as a tool. This, too, may be the book for you.

If you want to use the Windows version of PGP, this is not the book for you.

Simon Garfinkel's PGP is certainly informative and is written in light, breezy language that makes it easy reading for even the least technical. But, sadly, this book is so out of date as to be entirely useless with regard to actually using PGP today.