G10: The Free PGP Replacement

[Werner Koch]

Ian Brown <I.Brown at cs.ucl.ac.uk> writes:

> Werner, I presume you are writing your version in C. If you and Lutz
> were able to merge your two versions, and had support for ALL the
> cryptosystems mentioned in the OpenPGP draft, the result would be

I guess I should talk to Lutz.

For now it´s mainly 2.6 compatible (RFC1991) because I noticed OpenPGP
too late.  I use these one-pass packets, because they are a good idea.
The other stuff is a little bit weird:

 * Why do they reuse existing (RFC1991) packets (comment), where there
   are a lot of new packet numbers available. 

 * I don't think the new length headers make any sense; much to complicated.

I use simple 2 byte length headers when I have to process data from a
pipe and set the length bits of the CTB to 0 (conflicts with compressed
packets; may need the help of a marker packet or something to enable this
new encoding).  The advantage of this method is, that it can be handled on
a very low level (write the length header just the buffer is flushed)
because it can be any abitrary positive value.

> In other fora, most of the people on this list have been getting
> increasingly pissed off with PGP Inc. This could be the start of a real
> alternative to the GAKware Network Associates seem determined to pump

I noticed that there is not much traffic on the open-pgp list anymore;
will there be a new draft available or was this OpenPGP mainly driven
by PGP Inc and now canceled?


-- 
Werner Koch, Duesseldorf  -   werner.koch at guug.de   -  PGP keyID: 0C9857A5