Exactly 25 years ago the very first release of GnuPG was published. We
are pleased to take this opportunity to announce the availability of a
new stable GnuPG release: version 2.4.0.

This release has a few new features and the binary releases come with an
updated Libksba to fix another vulnerability related to CVE-2022-3515.

What is GnuPG
=============

The GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG, GPG) is a complete and free implementation
of the OpenPGP and S/MIME standards.

GnuPG allows to encrypt and sign data and communication, features a
versatile key management system as well as access modules for public key
directories. GnuPG itself is a command line tool with features for easy
integration with other applications. The separate library GPGME provides
a uniform API to use the GnuPG engine by software written in common
programming languages. A wealth of frontend applications and libraries
making use of GnuPG are available. As an universal crypto engine GnuPG
provides support for S/MIME and Secure Shell in addition to OpenPGP.

GnuPG is Free Software (meaning that it respects your freedom). It can
be freely used, modified and distributed under the terms of the GNU
General Public License.

Three different series of GnuPG are actively maintained:

- Version 2.4 is the current stable version with a lot of new features
compared to 2.2. This announcement is about the latest release of
this series; the previous release was 2.3.8.

- Version 2.2 is our LTS (long term support) version and guaranteed to
be maintained at least until the end of 2024. Only a small subset of
features from 2.4 has been back-ported to this series. See
https://gnupg.org/download/index.html#end-of-life

- Version 1.4 is only maintained to allow decryption of very old data
which is, for security reasons, not anymore possible with other GnuPG
versions. Please use 1.4 only for this purpose.

Getting the Software
====================

Please follow the instructions found at <https://gnupg.org/download/> or
read on:

GnuPG may be downloaded from one of the GnuPG mirror sites or direct
from its primary FTP server. The list of mirrors can be found at
<https://gnupg.org/download/mirrors.html>. Note that GnuPG is not
available at ftp.gnu.org.

The GnuPG source code compressed using BZIP2 and its OpenPGP signature
are available here:

https://gnupg.org/ftp/gcrypt/gnupg/gnupg-2.4.0.tar.bz2 (7487k)
https://gnupg.org/ftp/gcrypt/gnupg/gnupg-2.4.0.tar.bz2.sig

An installer for Windows without any graphical frontend except for a
very minimal Pinentry tool is available here:

https://gnupg.org/ftp/gcrypt/binary/gnupg-w32-2.4.0_20221216.exe (4816k)
https://gnupg.org/ftp/gcrypt/binary/gnupg-w32-2.4.0_20221216.exe.sig

The source used to build this Windows installer can be found in the same
directory with a ".tar.xz" suffix.

A link to GnuPG Desktop?, an AppImage for Linux, featuring this version
of GnuPG along with the advanced graphical user interface Kleopatra is
available from the download page:

https://gnupg.org/download/index.html#binary

A new release of Gpg4win (version 4.1.0) including this version of GnuPG
is available at

https://gpg4win.org

Internationalization
====================

This version of GnuPG has support for 26 languages with Chinese
(traditional and simplified), Czech, French, German, Italian,
Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian
being almost completely translated.