HOWTO on interfacing with gnupg/pgp?

Johan Wevers johanw@vulcan.xs4all.nl
Wed Jun 20 20:23:01 2001


You, Lionel Elie Mamane, wrote:


> Hmm.. No. If many are using IDEA on a personal, non commercial basis
> (thus not paying a license), it will become a "de facto" standard and
> a company that wants encrypted communications with everyone that
> wishes it will have to support IDEA. Thus pay for it.
I've used pgp 2.x once in a company, but noone paid any license fees. Noone even knew that would be required in some countries.
> But by using IDEA to communicate with other persons using PGP 2.x, you are
> not giving them compelling reasons to switch to an OpenPGP implementation,
> thus maintaining a population that supports
> *only* IDEA.
The advantage of pgp 2 is that it is fixed, no changes are made anymore and, except from attacks that require access to a computer that is supposed to be trusted, still very secure. And it exists for many platforms. For me, pgp 5 was no acceptable replacement when it came out (and considering the weak keygen on Linux I think I was proven right in my decision not to "upgrade"). For pgp 6, I could not even get the commandline version compiled on Linux, and the distributed executables are libc6 only. :-( GnuPG is becomming a good replacement for pgp 2, but has some incompatibility problems between versions. I still have some tests to do with conventional encryption file formats to start converting my encrypted archives. Pitty that GnuPG can't decrypt conventionally encrypted pgp 2 files. -- ir. J.C.A. Wevers // Physics and science fiction site: johanw@vulcan.xs4all.nl // http://www.xs4all.nl/~johanw/index.html PGP/GPG public keys at http://www.xs4all.nl/~johanw/pgpkeys.html