28 Chapter 2
Security and OpenPGP
Let’s consider the word security for a moment. This is one of
those poor innocent words that’s been kicked around until it
means just about anything the speaker wants it to. OpenPGP
provides some things that we normally think of as security, but
it’s really a very limited subset of the whole world of security.
OpenPGP won’t keep someone from stealing your com-
puter. It won’t stop someone from sending you three million
junk emails. It does provide confidentiality, integrity, and non-
repudiation, but its implementation of these are all tightly tied
to and derived from the idea of identity.
One can argue that the idea driving OpenPGP is identity
verification. Identifying people in person is pretty easy—
humans have ...