On Sep 17, 2008, at 12:38 AM, Kevin Hilton wrote:
I'm sure its probably contained in one of the RFC's, however when was DSA signing keys and ElGamal Encryption keys, along with the AES-256 cipher and SHA1 digest chosen as the defaults for key generation? Any particular reasons these were chosen as the defaults? (This is not an attempt to lure people into a discussion of which is better than that). I'm just curious why these were chosen as defaults.
There were many reasons behind it, but a significant one was that DSA signing keys and Elgamal encryption keys were not patented. It is difficult to establish a new protocol if a major chunk of it is patented. SHA1 was the state of the art hash then, and an obvious choice.
AES256 is not the default cipher. 3DES is. David _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
