Serpent Support

[Len Sassaman]

On 22 Feb 2002, Emilio Silva wrote:

> 1) Are there any plans to include Serpent support in Gnupg ?The large
> security margin of the cipher,the conservatism in its design and the good
> reputation of the people who created it,assure added value to GnuPG.

No. Serpent isn't part of OpenPGP, and having another cipher would cause
more backwards compatibility problems.

What's wrong with AES?

> 3)Using conventional encryption "the key is derived from the
> passphrase"(Gnupg handbook) but the exact procedure is not specified.I
> get two different encrypted outputs encrypting with the same
> file,passphrase,options and algorithms.How exactly does this work? (In
> conventional encryption).

Check RFC 2440 for exact details on how the internals of OpenPGP work.


--Len.