I installed PGP, but I don't understand how it is more useful than typical password protection.
I know about the public key to encrypt files sent to you by others, and the private key only the original user has to decrypt the files encrypted by his correspondents. And I know the public and private keys are impossibly long to remember or even crack with supercomputers and brute force. So I guess this is pretty good for transmitting files by email from Point A to Point B.
But what about files that reside on your own hard drive? Your private key is right there, located in a file that is kept in a known place within the app's own programming, and bearing a descriptive file name to indicate that what it is. The key is called out and applied when the user's app is launched and works after he simply enters the passphrase that he is keeping in is head. Chances are that even if he is working from a library or some other public station, that he has the private key with him on a thumbdrive or something to make sure he can open encrypted incoming email.
So the question is, if someone gets your private key by getting your thumbdrive or having stolen your computer, and then then really all it does take to decrypt stored files is brute force to get the passphrase, exactly how are you safer than you are using something much less complicated, like ABC Chaos, which has no public or private keys, just an encryption formula based on a guessable password?
Thanks.
Thanks.
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