Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is a computer program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication.
PGP is often used for signing, encrypting and decrypting e-mails to increase the security of e-mail communications. It was created by Philip Zimmermann in 1991.
The use of PGP in file exchanges has increased over the years and has become a common way of securing file contents. Thus, encountering this in more and varied projects is not unusual.
There are several implementations for popular platforms such as Java and .net; I classified them into brought camps of heavy commercial, or hard to use open source; thus the availability of easy to
implement PGP solutions for ColdFusions is limited. In particular, I found existing implementation rather difficult to use.
Thus, I embarked on this project. To make a long story short, I ended up using the underlying work of the
league of bouncy castle folks. The complete source code for those libraries can be downloaded from there.
I implemented the most common scenarios (generate keys or key rings, encrypt and decrypt) and exposed all this through a ColdFusion component to the world. Thus the effort to use of PGP is reduced to one liners of code (which I like).
Along the same lines, if you use Flex and needed a library to encrypt/decrypt this implementation can easily used as backend for that kind of scenario. A few tweaks to the main component should allow you to call on all the functions, read, write, generate keys etc.
Of course, there is so much more that can be done with PGP. Time permitting I may expand this implementation to expose other functionality.
You can download this from Github (https://github.com/Bilal-S/cfpgp/releases/tag/2.0.0).
Cheers,
-Bilal