Security and anti-virus vendor Network Associates (NAI) is kill its popular Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) email and document encryption product.

NAI had been searching for a buyer for the key-based encryption/decryption system since October last year.

'We simply could not find a buyer who was prepared to support PGP in the way we felt was necessary,' said Sarah Whipp, director of European marketing.

'We needed to pass on the technology to a company that was able to market it in a commercially-viable way and could take on our existing support contracts'.

NAI has confirmed that it is to cease development of PGP as a standalone product.

'We will see out existing support contracts and will endeavour to fix any bugs or defects in existing versions covered by those contracts, but there will be no further full-point releases of PGP,' said Whipp.

NAI expects the phasing out of support and development processes to take between one and two years.

But despite the failure of NAI to sell PGP, its creator still believes the technology will continue to thrive.

Its inventor Phil Zimmermann has said that PGP 'is an institution rather than a single product'.

Zimmermanm has also said that 'PGP is larger than any single code-base from any single company. There are a lot of very concerned people from the PGP user community who want to try to find a solution to fill this niche'.

NAI will continue to use PGP technology within a number of their other products, namely its firewall and VPN products.

Users of these and holders of support contracts for these products are not effected. Freeware email and file encryption technologies based on the PGP technology will continue to be available from third parties.