PGP and Real-World Cryptography

My previous post details setting up Sequoia PGP for email encryption, where I gloss over technical details in favor of waxing poetic about the virtues of privacy. That's all well and good, but I don't want to leave such details completely behind because they form an interesting window into the world of asymmetric cryptography. This whole PGP excursion has ignited within me a desire to learn more about cryptography generally, leading to the book Real-World Cryptography. The author has the following to say about PGP: The most critical issue is that encryption is not authenticated, which means that anyone intercepting an email that hasn't been signed might be able to tamper with the encrypted content to some degree, depending on the exact encryption algorithm used. For this reason alone, I would not recommend anyone to use PGP today. (David Wong) Not a very positive review, I'd say. Further points are well-argued, and the case against PGP is strong. Well, maybe I should rephrase that as…