The customer stated that he can accept a public key generated with either Blowfish or Triple-DES. I wasn't sure what he needed because all I've dealt with in generating a key pair before is selecting the DSA or RSA option. Our PGP version doesn't offer the DSA and Elgamal option.
I've sent him a GnuPG-generated key, and asked him to find out if they are using GnuPG. I haven't heard from him today. Cathy --- Cathy L. Smith Engineer Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Operated by Battelle for the U.S. Department of Energy Phone: 509.375.2687 Fax: 509.375.2330 Email: [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: Robert J. Hansen [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, May 01, 2009 3:58 PM To: Smith, Cathy Cc: Allen Schultz; gnupg-users; Hallquist, Roy S Jr Subject: Re: Selecting cipher to generate a key pair Smith, Cathy wrote: > Is there a brief explanation available as to how the cipher is used in > generating the private/public keys? It seems this is separate from > the cipher that is chosen to encrypt my data. r...@chronicles:~$ gpg --enable-dsa2 --gen-key Please select what kind of key you want: (1) DSA and Elgamal (default) (2) DSA (sign only) (5) RSA (sign only) If you choose #1, you will be using, by default, DSA as a signature algorithm, AES256 as a general-purpose message encryption algorithm, Elgamal as an asymmetric encryption algorithm, and SHA1 as a hash algorithm. None of these algorithms are actually used to generate the private/public keys, though. The private and public keys are just numbers. GnuPG generates those numbers from a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator, then subjects the numbers to a battery of mathematical tests to make sure the keys are safe to use. Is it possible for you to tell us what algorithms your correspondent expects you to use? Knowing that might help us out quite a bit. _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
