How secure is GnuPG

[Waldemar Brodkorb]

Hi,
David Shaw wrote,

> On Tue, Jul 23, 2002 at 11:38:39AM -0400, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> > 2)  RSA and factoring.
> > 
> > I have read that the author of qmail (a cryptographer) devised a
> > hypothetical machine which could use parallelism to improve factoring
> > speed.
> > Some have advised to only use 2048 bit RSA keys from now on.
> 
> Some folks disagree.  Even Bernstein himself points out that his
> proposed method may not be usable in practice.
> 
> In any event, it is perfectly reasonable to make 2048 bit (or larger)
> RSA keys if you prefer.
> 
> > How does this affect a default GnuPG setup?
> > When I setup GnuPG (v 1.0.6) the options only included DSA and ElGamal.
> > Does this mean that GnuPG does not use RSA by default?
> 
> It means you need to upgrade :)  GnuPG 1.0.7 includes RSA key generation.

Is it possible to use RSA keys for message encryption in GnuPG?

Recently I've discussed about this on a german mailinglist and I
think someone could use RSA keys only for signing with GnuPG. Right?
PGP 7.x seems to do both. 

RFC2440 says:
In a key that has a main key and subkeys, the primary key MUST be a
key capable of signing. The subkeys may be keys of any other
type. There may be other constructions of V4 keys, too. For example,
there may be a single-key RSA key in V4 format, a DSA primary key with
an RSA encryption key, or RSA primary key with an Elgamal subkey,
etc.


Are there any plans to integrate this feature?

It's not on the TODO list from CVS. 

best regards

  Waldemar

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