3DES key generation

[Johan Wevers]

You, Egon Andersen, wrote:

> I had a closer look at "The GNU Privacy Handbook" Chapter 2 under 
> Symmetric ciphers, it says: "... 3DES, Blowfish, and IDEA all use 
> 128-bit keys, ..."

That's incorrect for 3DES.

> But now I came to think about it.
> Can I in principle use 'any' bit-string with the required number of bits 
> as my key?

As another reply indicated, you can put them in manually (I completely
forgot about putting them in, I knew about the show option), to use the
--show-session-key and --override-session-key <string> options. But I as
far as I know this can't be combined with symetric encryption. When using
conventional encryption, the symmetric key is the SHA1 hash of the
passphrase.

-- 
ir. J.C.A. Wevers         //  Physics and science fiction site:
johanw@vulcan.xs4all.nl   //  http://www.xs4all.nl/~johanw/index.html
PGP/GPG public keys at http://www.xs4all.nl/~johanw/pgpkeys.html