Jamie Wilkinson wrote:

Does anyone know much about GPG's encryption ciphers, and how well they
recover from stream errors?

It's been brought to my attention that a gpg encrypted backup on a tape
may be susceptible to a bad block on the tape, and I want to know how
much redundancy there is in the cipher, which may be none in order to
fend off brute force attacks.

If not, does anyone have any recommendations on where I can start
looking?  A google on error recovery for each of the ciphers in gpg
--version wasn't very useful.



I'm no expert, but RSA has pretty good error detection, which is about as much as you can hope for. Other algorithms won't even do that, but a message can be both signed and encrypted of course.

The fact that the size of encrypted data == size of plaintext is a bit of a hint as to the levels of redundancy =)


Felix -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html

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