This one time, at band camp, Jeff Waugh wrote:
><quote who="Jamie Wilkinson">
>
>> Does anyone know much about GPG's encryption ciphers, and how well they
>> recover from stream errors?
>
>> 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.
>
>Isn't that because they're orthogonal features?

I don't know, that's why I'm asking :-)

>Surely the right way to
>approach this is to ensure the redundancy of the encrypted data, not build
>it into the encryption mechanism... Once upon a time I asked about lossy
>encryption. :-)

The goal is to make a gpg encrypted tarball as recoverable from a bad
tape block as a plain tarball -- tar will complain that the file that
lives on the bad block is dead but it will continue on with the
extraction.  In my experience, unexpected input causes gpg to abort
violently -- I'm not sure if that's just due to my choice of the default
cipher when encrypting.

So I'm now led to believe that any cipher that uses a CBC style
algorithm can cope with errors, but gpg specifically aborts when an
error is encountered.  It looks like that behaviour can be disabled with
the --ignore-mdc-error option though.

-- 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]                           http://spacepants.org/jaq.gpg
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