PGPMenu Design

Derek Atkins

<warlord@MIT.EDU> PGPMenu was designed with the novice or occasional PGP user in mind. It was supposed to be easy to use and easy to configure. While not all of the PGP functionality is provided, a reasonable subset is included.

Some of the goals of the PGPMenu design:

Make it easy for novice users to use PGP effectively
Provide all the common functionality of PGP
Provide a simple mechanism to configure PGP functions
- Simple controls to modify useful configuration parameters
- The configuration can be saved to disk
- PGP usage other than PGPMenu will use the saved configuration
- Allow multiple keys and make it easy to switch which key is in use
User's passphrases should remain secure
Integrate PGP into the MIT infrastructure
- Allow Keyserver requests to store and fetch keys
- Enable a user to join the MIT Certification Hierarchy by getting their key signed by the MIT Keysigner
Easily allow the code to be used outside MIT