musings...

[Werner Koch]

On Wed, 7 Aug 2002 07:56:47 +0100 (BST), john clark said:

> 2) In importing a large batch of pubkeys contained in
> one file, how
> can you choose which of the keys you want and discard
> the others?
> Like a "confirm import user foo? [y/n] ... " prompt

Well there is an option --interactive which I added for this reason,
but I have not come around to implement it.

> 3) I'm just curious on this one. Is there a way that
> the short form
> of the key id as exemplified by the string
> `0x48888458' be generated
> again? How do you generate user/key ids BTW? Is there

That is defined in rfc2440.  For the old v3 keys (which are only RSA)
there are the LSB of the modulus.  For v4 keys the keyID is simply a
shortened fingerpint.

No there is no randomness in it but derived form the key.

> 4) Lastly, I think PGP implements key generation
> nicely in a way that
> it shows you the percentage of random bytes needed
> then stops you
> when it reaches 100%. It's not that whatever feature
> PGP has I tend

Due to the way primes are generated in GnuPG it is not possible to
exactly predict the required number of random bytes.  And we can't
give an estimate on how long it takes to generate a key - this is due
to the nature of the primes non deterministic.


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner