Decoded message was: Re: Article on PGP uses Gnupg :)

[Charly Avital]

At 9:18 AM +0100 1/15/03, Per Tunedal wrote:
[...]
>What's the implication of this? The encryption key 0x7846C3D2 that
>Christopher Allbritton used is a 1024 bits ElGamal key. Can it easily be
>broken?

The quoted Popular Mechanics article included two pict files, one showing
the message "before" encryption, and the second one, the message "after"
encryptyion.

Apart from the fact that the key is real, there is no way to know whether
the messages themselves are real.

>What's Amazing Powers(tm)?? How fast was the message decoded? On what kind
>of hardware?
>
"Amazing Powers (tm)" was surely intended as a joke. At least, that's the
way I understood it.

>Should the keys be longer for secure encryption? And what about the signing
>keys?

The key is real.
Let's assume that both messges, before and after encryption, are real,
meaning that the cyphertext  is the result of the plaintext encrypted to
that key.

Let's also assume that both pict files can be scanned and OCR'd into real
data material, would it be possible then to retrieve the secret key (and
passphrase)?

And if it is possible (?), who would want to do that?

Charly