PGP Corporate Desktop

Earlier known as PGP Enterprise, this product is meant to secure desktops in an enterprise environment. The product itself has a desktop and an administration component. The desktop version consists of PGPmail and PGPdisk, which encrypt e-mail messages and data on the hard drive, respectively. It’s easy to install, although it requires a restart after installation.

When you access it for the first time, it creates a public/private key pair for you, and then let’s you host your public key on a number of public key servers on the Internet. Also, it allows you to create multiple keys for yourself. You need to give a passphrase for each key that you create and you’re asked for it every time you use your key. 

Most of the controls in PGP can be accessed from the PGPtray icon. One good thing about the software is that it informs you when passphrases are cached, so that you can remove them before anybody else misuses it. A small, but nagging issue we found was that if you accidentally/intentionally hide the PGPtray icon, then unhiding it the first time can be a hard task.

Although there’s a PGPtray application present in the Program Files folder to bring it back, it doesn’t appear in the Start Menu. Both PGP Desktop and Enterprise require a restart after installation.

PGPmail has plug-ins for MS Outlook and Outlook Express, and also Eudora. A Lotus Notes component is available too.

However, you don’t necessarily have to send e-mail through these mail clients. You can even draft a message in any other application such as Word or Notepad, and then encrypt it from PGPtray. It can also automatically encrypt e-mail file attachments. PGPdisk, on the other hand, is pretty handy if you want to protect data on your system as it creates volumes on your existing hard drive that contain data you want to protect in encrypted form. 

The admin part of PGP is also quite powerful, comprising of PGPAdmin, PGP Keyserver, and LDAP server schemas.

S N   A   P   S   H O   T
Price	:	Rs 6,875 for one year’s subscription, upgrades, and support; Rs 17,050 perpetual license with one-year upgrade
Key Specs	:	Secure messaging and data storage, Additional Decryption keys, PGPAdmin and Keyserver
Contact	:	Taarak India, Delhi
E-mail	:	jose@taraak.com

PGPAdmin is of course meant for the network administrator to manage PGP. As it let’s you create custom PGP client installers, where you can include the settings you want the client to have. For instance, you can enable and enforce a feature called Advanced Decryption keys on the clients. This feature let’s the administrator decrypt any client’s e-mail messages. It’s like an emergency key, which the administrator can use to open an important message in case the user is not present. This feature should be practiced with caution and only when absolutely necessary. 

Lastly, there’s the PGPKeyserver, used to manage public keys of users on your network. So, instead of sending your public keys to a public domain keyserver, you send it to your own private keyserver. This feature works very well, and users can even use it to search for the public keys of other users on your network in order to send them encrypted messages. 

Overall, it’s a great product for the enterprise requiring a secure communication infrastructure on their network. 

Anil Chopra