There are many other useful business tasks facilitated by Public-key cryptography. More information on this technology is available on our intranet server.
IT Audit and the Network and Data Security groups have been using PGP-Freeware with positive results. As explained below, use of PGP-Freeware for business communications is no longer permissible, under PGP.Com's interpretation of the license for that product.
PGP and GnuPG public key queries and key-registration using Internet keyservers will work for HTTP keyservers (after configuration of the client proxy settings, however, registration and queries will not work using LDAP protocol to servers on the Internet. Our team no longer operates an Intranet keyserver, due to a drive failure on our development machine
There are plug-ins for PGP and GnuPG for Outlook and Outlook Express, along with many other email clients. Microsoft has no plans to directly support PGP in Outlook, Exchange or Active Directory, instead, Microsoft provides integrated support for S/MIME, using the X.509 certificate format. Here is a (somewhat dated) comparison between the various protocols:
http://www.imc.org/smime-pgpmime.html
In general, S/MIME is easier to deploy in a Microsoft-centric (Exchange and AD) environment, for purely internal communications, yet PGP/MIME (and now OpenPGP) is the de-facto standard on the Internet.
The commercial PGP division was recently sold by Network Associates. There is a new "PGP.Com" site, with information on products and pricing:
http://www.pgp.com/faq.php
Will You Continue to Support Freeware Products?
Yes. PGP will continue the tradition of freeware products for non-commercial use. The next release of PGP freeware will be in November 2002 for PGP 8.0 for Windows and MacOS X. Customers using freeware products for commercial use - using PGP freeware to communicate with licensed business users - must immediately cease usage and purchase a commercial PGP license. Products can be purchased at https://store.pgp.com/.
Company employees using the "PGP Freeware" unlicensed application must immediately cease usage.
Promotional pricing for the commercial PGP product is available through October 31st. The promotional price for "Corporate Desktop" is $70, "PGP Mail" is $45. Prices are per-seat for any quantity, these prices will increase significantly on November 1st, 2002.
http://www.pgp.com/promo.php
An alternative to purchasing commercial PGP is to deploy GnuPG, the GNU-licensed freeware implementation:
- http://www.gnupg.org/
- http://www3.gdata.de/gpg/
