PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is a cryptographic process used to encrypt and decrypt information. It combines concepts from symmetric and asymmetric key encryption, maintaining some of the best security and usability aspects of both.

One way PGP can be used is to protect the confidentiality of information. Once the information is encrypted, nobody will be able to decrypt it unless they have the right key. In practice, PGP is commonly used in sending and receiving emails, sharing information on the Dark Web, and others. This is because both on and off the Internet, there are ways to intercept information being sent, making encryption using PGP or similar critical.

On a high-level the process between a sender and receiver looks like this:

1. The recipient generates public and private keys.
2. The recipient sends its public key to the sender.
3. The sender encrypts the message using the given public key.
4. The sender sends the encrypted message to the recipient.
5. The recipient decrypts the message using its private key.

PGP Examples in Node.js

Now, let’s go over some examples in Node.js using the openpgp library.

• OpenPGP is a protocol that defines the standards for PGP. OpenPGP.js implements the OpenPGP protocol in JavaScript.

We’ll go over some basic examples and show how to encrypt & decrypt large files using Node.js streams.

First, set up your Node.js project and install openpgp.js:

mkdir pgp-tutorial && cd pgp-tutorial && npm init
npm i openpgp --save

Note: examples use openpgp v4.10.8

#Security #NodeJS #Encryption