symmetric

[Werner Koch]

On Thu, 09 May 2002 11:36:50 +0000, Aurelio Turco said:

> Under what circumstances would one want to use
> a purely symmetric cipher (ie: gpg -c)?

If you already have an established way for key distribution, symmetric
only encryptions give you the advantage of good forward secrecy by
periodicly changing the key.  Remember that a compromise of your
secret keys reveals all messages ever encrypted to this one.  The same
thing can be achieved with periodic encryption subkey roll over but
then we get into problems with the keyservers who can't grok multiple
subkeys.

  Werner