Exchanging with PGP users

[Jan Petranek]

On Sat, 3 Feb 2001, Subba Rao wrote:

> I am looking for any information that can allow GnuPG and PGP users to exchange
> information securely. Is there any plugin or so for GnuPG to send PGP users
> messages? Some of my friends are well trenched into PGP and shrug off GnuPG.
> How can I read their messages sent to me? I have GnuPG 1.0.4.

Actually, you don't need any plugins or stuff like that. Since GnuPG is
based on OpenPGP and OpenPGP is based on PGP 5.0, all should work out
fine.

Indeed, for trial purposes I have tried using pgp 5.0 and gpg 1.04 at the
same time (both on linux). I was able to
- generate keys with both programs
- export the public key from gpg
- import the public keys to pgp
- encrypt with pgp to the public key
- also, to sign it with pgp (using another key, generated with pgp)
- decrypt with gpg
- and, best of all, do the whole thing the other way round (encrypt with
gpg and read with pgp)

But if your friends are using PGP 5, so you better use the
force-v3-sigs
option (as found in .gnupg/options), as it makes gpg behave more
compliant. If your friends are using pgp2.6x or pgp with IDEA-encryption,
you should tell them to switch to pgp 5 or later.

Hope I could help,

JanP