PGP and GnuPG specifications (was: Post-quantum defaults)

Werner Koch via Gnupg-users <[email protected]> Thu, 07 May 2026 11:28:00 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.encryption.gpg.user
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Hi!

There is a thing one should remember when talking about GnuPG and *PGP:
GnuPG did not start on a clean field but had to be compatible with PGP-5
and later (and also for a long time with PGP-2).  Certain details are
not as I or others would have done them but they needed to be done in
that way because PGP did it so.  If was a smart good move from Phil and
Jon to initialize the OpenPGP WG in 1997 leading to RFC2440 a year later
and with minor updates in RFC4880 another 9 years later.

However, one thing is a specification and the other thing is running
code.  The running code in 1997 was PGP 5 and GnuPG followed the
development and peculiarities of that implementation closely.  There has
been a good understanding between the folks actually writing the code on
how to do things which have not been fully specified of where an one
implementation derived from the RFC.

The overall result was a way better interoperable protocol than the
committee designed CMS specifications with all there profiles and
non-interoperable implementation assumptions.


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner



p.s.
I did not like to coin the term LibrePGP because actually GnuPG was the
software which consistently talked about OpenPGP and not about PGP or
GPG when talking about the protocol.  But eventually I came up with
LibrePGP to help avoiding confusion about what new protocol variant we
are talking about.

-- 
The pioneers of a warless world are the youth that
refuse military service.             - A. Einstein

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