PGP Encryption is used in the business environment to solve problems related to transmitting data securely. As in this example (the single slide below). The accounting firm for Contoso needs to securely transmit confidential data to their client.
PGP is ideally suited for this task. An interchange is compressed and then encoded in binary format. Optionally, it can be encoded in an ASCII format, specifically to send via email.
How is this done? Contoso uses PGP Encryption software to create a “key pair”. A key pair consists of a public key and a matching private key. The public key is accessed by its “Key ID” to encode an interchange. The private key is accessed by using its secret “passphrase” to decode an encrypted interchange. To be useful Contoso makes its public key available to those entities it may wish to send it secured interchanges. In our example this is the accounting firm of Dewey, Cheatum & Howe, CPA. Contoso has created a key pair and sends the public key (or has it available on their website) via email. D,C&H also has encryption software, and with that software adds that public key to its own public key ring.
Now when the accounting firm needs to electronically send confidential data to Contoso, the data is encrypted with that public key, using that public key’s “Key ID”. This key id distinguishes which key on the key ring is the right key.
These four slides visually present the process.
In Part 2, we will go over the fundamental pieces that the Custom Pipeline Component needs to performing encoding and decoding with PGP.
