> Are those the only two in GnuPG you don't see a need for? What > algorithms do you prefer?
I know this wasn't addressed to me, but what the heck. I won't share my preferences, but this is some modestly-accurate history. Way back when, DSA and Elgamal had to be the defaults in OpenPGP because RSA Data Security held the patent on the RSA algorithm, whereas DSA and Elgamal were patent-free. That patent was relinquished in September of 2000. Twofish became part of the suite of ciphers with PGP 7, and GnuPG had to support it because PGP 7 made it their default. In PGP 7.1 they switched to AES (which had just been released) but left Twofish in because Twofish had Schneier cachet. This is also probably why Blowfish is still an approved algorithm. IDEA continued to be supported almost entirely for backwards compatibility with PGP 2.6; it has not held up at all well, and is probably the weakest cipher in the suite. (I have heard it said Blowfish was introduced to the spec as a fallback in case CAST5 turned out to have flaws. Given how similar CAST5 and Blowfish are, design-wise, if this is true I think it was terrible reasoning.) So right there, you can see that DSA, Elgamal, Twofish, and Blowfish, all exist in the spec for non-engineering reasons: patent infringement, fame of designer, backwards compatibility, etc. I won't bore you with my list of preferred algos, though. :) _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users