Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing GNU Privacy Guard vs CipherShed, the Slant community recommends GNU Privacy Guard for most people. In the question“What are the best file encryption tools?” GNU Privacy Guard is ranked 2nd while CipherShed is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose GNU Privacy Guard is:
GPG works on OS X, Linux, and Windows with [extensive selection of wrappers](https://www.gnupg.org/related_software/frontends.html).
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Cross-platform
GPG works on OS X, Linux, and Windows with extensive selection of wrappers.
Pro Multiple types of encryption algorithms
GPG supports public key cryptography (RSA EIGamal, DSA), symmetrical key algorithms (Blowfish, AES, IDEA, etc), cryptographic hash functions (RIPEMD, SHA), and compression (ZIP, ZLIB, BZIP2).
Pro Excellent but...
Open source (the free version of openPgp), other similar products are offered for other platforms (Gpg4win for Windows for example). It is the most secure way to send emails today, close to military encryption. Some negative points: not all mail clients support it and when a key is not only on your hard disk but also on a server (pgp.mit.edu for example), it is complicated to remove it.
Last positive point: it can also be used other than for emails, to encrypt and sign documents. Bitcoin releases are signed with the GPG keys of the developers ;)
Pro Supports paired keys
Allows for encrypted communication.
Pro Volume and individual file encryption
With GPG you can encrypt you whole volume or files individually.
Pro Supports expiring signatures
GPG keys by default expire after a set amount of time. The amount can be changed and this feature can be turned off.
Pro Both CLI and GUI versions available
GPG can be installed as a command line tool, or you can choose between several different GUI frontends available for it.
Pro Open-source and battle-tested
GPG is the oldest and most reliable encryption software available.
Pro Built on top of TrueCrypt
CipherShed is built on top of the famous and now abandoned TrueCrypt and it comes with a lot of things that TrueCrypt had.
Pro Completely free
CipherShed is completely free and open source.
Pro Cross-platform
Available on Windows, OS X and Linux
Cons
Con It may be hard to find a GUI frontend that suits your needs
If you decide not to use the CLI version of GPG, it may be hard to find a GPG GUI version that suits your needs simply because of the sheer number of different versions available.
Con Difficult to enhance key derivation
Since CipherShed decided to keep the TrueCrypt compatibility, and stick with that format they also have to stick with TrueCrypt's key derivation which was released in 2004 and understandably does not offer the same security that it did when first released.
