* What's this?

EasyPG is yet another GnuPG interface for Emacs.  It consists of two
parts: transparent file encryption utility and easy-to-use elisp
library to interact with GnuPG.

* Requirements

** GNU Emacs 21.4 or later

** XEmacs 21.4 or later

** GnuPG 1.4.3 or later

** Gnus 5.10.8 or later (optional)

* Quick start

** Transparent file encryption

EasyPG provides transparent file encryption similar to crypt++,
alpaca.el, hedgehog.  To try this feature, put (require 'epg-file)
in your ~/.emacs.el and C-x C-f ~/test.txt.gpg.

** Using with Gnus/PGG

EasyPG provides an implementation of the backend interface of
Gnus/PGG.  To use EasyPG instead of pgg-gpg, install pgg-epg.el and
add the following line to your ~/.gnus

(setq pgg-scheme 'epg)

* Advantages over other competitors

There are many competitors of EasyPG such as Mailcrypt, PGG, gpg.el,
etc.  EasyPG has some advantages over them.

** EasyPG avoides potential security flaws of Emacs.

*** `call-process-region' writes data in region to temporary files.

`call-process-region' writes data in region to temporary files.  PGG
and gpg.el use `call-process-region' to communicate with a gpg
subprocess.  Your passphrases leak to the filesystem!

*** There is no way to clear strings safely.

If Emacs crashed and dumps core, passphrase strings in memory are also
dumped within the core file.  `read-passwd' function clears passphrase
strings by `(fillarray string 0)'.  However, Emacs performs compaction
in gc_sweep phase.  If GC happens before `fillarray', passphrase
strings may be moved elsewhere in memory.  It is recommended that as
soon as you are done with passphrase you should clear it manually.
However, PGG and gpg.el can keep passphrase strings in cache for a
while and this behavior is their default!

** GnuPG features are directly accessible from Emacs

Other competitors provide only specific features of GnuPG since they
still support PGP 2.*, 5.*, 6.*.  As the name indicates, EasyPG is
inspired by GPGME (GnuPG Made Easy), and the library interface is
close to GPGME.  With EasyPG you can benefit from a lot of features of
GnuPG.