Introduction 5
made heavy use of the patent-protected RSA and IDEA encryp-
tion techniques; anyone who wanted to use PGP commercially
needed to pay a license fee to the patent holders. Many
computer scientists and security professionals found this unac-
ceptable because they wanted an encryption system that would
be freely usable by both the general public and businesses.
Zimmermann offered a solution in 1998, when his com-
pany, PGP Corporation, submitted an improved PGP design
called OpenPGP to the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF), the body responsible for Internet standards. OpenPGP
defined standards by which different programs could commu-
nicate freely but securely by using an enhanced version of the
PGP protocol and a variety of different ...