does gpg cope with very large key sizes

[David Shaw]

On Sep 13, 2009, at 1:07 PM, Philippe Cerfon wrote:

> Hi.
>
> For those wo are interested,... ;)
>
> I've aborted trying to create a 65536 bit RSA key. Took just too long
> and I don't know enough on key generation to make an estimation ;)
>
>
> Anyway,.. when trying to create 32768 bit RSA key I've got the  
> following error:
> We need to generate a lot of random bytes. It is a good idea to  
> perform
> some other action (type on the keyboard, move the mouse, utilize the
> disks) during the prime generation; this gives the random number
> generator a better chance to gain enough entropy.
> .......................+++++
> .........................................................................+ 
> ++++
> gpg: out of secure memory while allocating 4096 bytes
> gpg: (this may be caused by too many secret keys used simultaneously
> or due to excessive large key sizes)
>
> Is this a bug? Or is there anything I can do to get more "secure  
> memory"?

No, it's not a bug.  You're hacking the code to get it to do something  
the developers explicitly don't permit doing.  You can't file a bug  
against a car for not driving straight after you removed a wheel.  The  
rules of this game are: if you break it, you get to keep the pieces.

You can get more secure memory by changing the call to secmem_init in  
gpg.c.

David