GPA - Gnu Privacy Assisstent

The GNU Privacy Assistent (GPA) is a official graphical user interface for the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG). GnuPG and GPA have been partially sponsored by the german Ministery of Economy and Technolgy (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie). The project Freie Software und IT-Sicherheit (Free Software and IT Security) leveraged the wide-spread use of encryption and signatures for electronic correspondence.

Intevation GmbH was contracted by G-N-U to take over the management for the final phase of the project as well as for ongoing design and development of the graphical user interface GPA. Intevation accompanied the project from June 2000 upto its successful completion and final presentation at CeBIT in March 2001.

During this time Bernhard Reiter lead the project. He was backed by Jan-Oliver Wagner who at the same time coordinated and actively participated the development of GPA. All major technical challenges were solved by Bernhard Herzog, chief-developer at Intevation.

A special aim among others was the availability of the cryptography tools also for the operating system Windows. Thus, GPA and GnuPG have been realized so that they can be used cross-plattform. This meant a challenge mainly for the development of the graphical user interface.

For the tasks of software development, Intevation closely worked together with g10 Code who did all major concepts and developments of GnuPG.

Other project participants have written german documentation and general essays on cryptography and how to use GnuPG and GPA. The inteded audience of these documents are novice users. Within a subsequent project called GnuPP G-N-U compiled documents together with a installation CD. The package was broadly distributed by the ministry.