Hi! I'm the principal author of the FAQ.
4. The FAQs would benefit from updating
Yes, they would. I stepped away from my role as FAQ maintainer a few years ago in protest of some very unwise decisions by the FSF. It's been unmaintained since. I'm working on a totally rewritten FAQ, but it will be entirely my own work and not FSF/FSFE supported. Unfortunately, progress on this has gone quite slowly due to a health crisis (which is slowly improving, thank you to everyone who's thought of me).
I don't think questions like "Is this the official GnuPG FAQ?" are that "frequently asked."
That was in fact the *most* frequently asked. It started life as my own personal list of questions people kept asking me. Far and away the most commonly asked question was whether my personal FAQ represented official guidance from GnuPG and/or whether I was an official team member. That FAQ used to have an answer of "No, and I'm not part of the GnuPG team."
More topically, it has several FAQs discouraging users from using anything longer than RSA-2048, when it now defaults to RSA-3072.
Yes, it badly needs a refresh.
6. I question whether the FAQ's discussion on algorithms in is up-to- date. It gives no mention to ed25519, which I understand is the most reliable ECC cypher. It says that 3DES is still reliable, but I thought all DES-based cyphers were obsolete. I've never seen Camellia offered as a GPG cypher option, so I'm not sure of the relevance of including it. You get the picture.
It predates widespread adoption of ECC. 3DES is still considered secure for files under about 8 MiB in size. Past that you run into an unacceptable risk of block collision attacks. The FAQ's guidance on 3DES is still accurate. (It may say to avoid 3DES for files larger than 1 GiB, which was accurate at the time of writing.) 3DES is not a recommended cipher due to the 64-bit block size, or how slow and inefficient it is. There are many good reasons to prefer more modern algorithms and I don't want to be mistaken for sounding like I'm recommending 3DES. I'm not. But it's still considered quite safe against cryptanalysis for files smaller than 8 MiB.
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