DSA keys limited to 3072 bits in GnuPG -- should have harder failure mode?

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On 09/29/2010 04:44 AM, Werner Koch wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Sep 2010 19:23, dkg at fifthhorseman.net said:
> 
>> in writing up a little benchmarking script, i noticed that DSA keys are
>> limited to 3072 bits max.
> 
> That is per FIPS 186-3.

yup, understood.

>> The attached patch is a proposal to fail hard in this situation.
> 
> Which would break a couple of frontends.

frontends which currently silently fail to meet their users' requests
and proceed anyway?

> This also allows us to
> silently allow larger keys once it has been defined

at that point, you would presumably move the upper limit in the same
lines affected by the patch.

>  - despite that
> nobody will ever use DSA keys > 3072.

:)  So why not explicitly fail when people ask for them?

	--dkg

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