The GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) is a free replacement for the PGP suite of cryptographic software. It is released under the GNU General Public License and initially developed by Werner Koch[?].
GPG is very stable, production-quality software. As such, it is frequently included in free operating systems, such as the BSDs and GNU/Linux. Although the basic GPG program has a command line interface, there exist various front-ends that provide it with a graphical user interface; for example, it has been integrated into KMail[?], the graphical email client found in KDE.
GPG can also be compiled for other platforms like Mac OS X and Windows due to its open source nature.
GPG is a hybrid encryption software program in that it uses a combination of conventional symmetric-key cryptography[?] and public-key cryptography to secure data.
