Hi. Now this is surely gnupg specific again ;-)
Ok let me see... 1) When creating keys or other data which needs random numbers, how is this done in gnupg? I mean does it per default use /dev/random? Or does it have its own means like a modified Mersenne Twister or whatever? I wonder because I'd to test the used source with this http://www.cacert.at/random/ so is there perhaps some function in gpg to just generate a bunch of random data as it would be used for key generation (both symmetric and asymmetric). 2) It seems that the following is an old issue coming again and again over this list. gpg per default does not create keys larger than 4096 bits (talking about RSA), but it can use keys (and signatures/encrypted data created by such keys) larger than that, right? Is there any actual limit (apart from computation power and life time)? I fully agree that it makes sense to set this limit, as keys larger than 4096 bits are not that much usable and its questionable if one gets that much security by using a say 65563 bits key. However I wanted to do some compatibility tests with gnupg and other implementations (PGP, BPG and perhaps some others). It seems that it's quite easy to disable this limit in the gnupg source, all I have to do is set max=something in keygen.c, correct? Is there any knowledge about specific weaknesses of such large keys? I mean there might be strange effects with the PNRGs that don't happen until some large keysizes, but would effectively render these super large keys completely unsecure. Cheers, Peter _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
