From April 4 to 6, 2025, the Wau-Holland Foundation hosted the 9th OpenPGP Summit in Dietzenbach near Frankfurt with the active support of Patrick Brunschwig (Enigmail) and Kai Engert (Thunderbird). With 26 participants (three of whom attended remotely), this is one of the largest OpenPGP Summits to date - confirming that, even twelve years after the Snowden revelations, email encryption is still an important tool for enabling informational self-determination and the right to digital privacy.
Developers of all major OpenPGP projects and applications were represented at the summit - Proton, Thunderbird, Sequoia, BSI, RNP, rPGP, Delta Chat and keys.openpgp.org are just a few examples. Today, the OpenPGP ecosystem is no longer limited to traditional email encryption, but forms the basis for many different applications based on a common technology standard. It is regrettable that the GnuPG project has left this consensus (and the OpenPGP Summit) with its spin-off “LibrePGP”.
After the new OpenPGP standard (RFC 9580) was published in July 2024, the topic of PQC (Post-Quantum Cryptography) was at the forefront of this summit. An RFC draft that extends OpenPGP with this new technology is in the final stages of development and will hopefully come into force as a new IETF standard by the next OpenPGP Summit.
But many other topics were also discussed in self-organized working groups - the Meeting Minutes, which can be found on the openpgp.org website, provide a good overview.
The Wau-Holland Foundation would like to thank all those who made this summit possible and made it a great experience through their committed discussions. We are looking forward to the 10th OpenPGP Summit next year, which will again take place in Dietzenbach.
