Safety questions

[Michal Wencl]

Hi everybody.

I have a few questions on how to use GPG or encryption in general:

1. Is it better to encrypt (by symmetric cipher) plain file or a=20
compressed one? Does it even matter?
2. Is there a safety risk if an attacker knows the target file=20
type (structure), e. g. if he or she knows that the encrypted=20
file is a JPEG picture, HTML document, gzip archive, Windows=20
executable, Unix binary etc.?
3. If an attacker gets a plaintext and a ciphertext can he or she=20
find the passphrase?

And the last one:
4. Is there a GNU replacement for PGPdisk?

Regards,
Michal Wencl

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