On 8/23/2010 4:56 PM, Jerry wrote: > What is the difference between choices 1 & 2? Is one better than the > other? Which would be preferred? I am assuming #1; however, "KGPG" (In > the KDE suite) seems to prefer choice #2.
All asymmetric cryptography is built on math problems that are so hard they cannot be solved unless you already know part of the answer. For instance, factoring a number is hard: what two prime factors go into 2,701? But if I give you one of those prime factors (37), it's really easy to figure out the other one (73). RSA is built on the Integer Factorization Problem (IFP). This is pretty much exactly what's described above. DSA and Elgamal are built on the Discrete Logarithm Problem (DLP). This is a different kind of problem involving computing discrete logarithms in a finite field -- another problem that's widely considered to be intractable unless you already know part of the answer. That's the big difference between DSA/Elgamal and RSA. From a purely functional perspective, they are almost entirely equivalent. (One might be a few milliseconds faster for encryption, one might be a few milliseconds faster for decryption -- but that's hardly a big deal.) "Better" is a subjective term. I don't know what "better" means to you, so I can't answer it. A lot of pointless holy wars have erupted over which key type is "better", and my best advice is to ignore the question completely. GnuPG has sensible defaults. You don't need to override them. _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
