Question about subkeys for a GnuPG generated RSA key

[Adrian von Bidder]

On Friday 09 January 2004 09:45, Tarald.Holm at telenor.com wrote:
> Hi.
>
> Probably a simple question to answer: When I generated a Key pair for
> GnuPG, and selected RSA/RSA (Which I did because my front end said
> something about PGP, and I thought it a good idea to be compatible) 2 keys
> appear when other people try to encrypt mesages with my public key.

Please be a bit more specific - I am not sure what you mean by '2 keys 
appear'. 

Could it be that both your primary RSA key and your RSA subkey are specified 
as being capable to encrypt messages?

PGP compatibility: This is only really relevant if you want to be compatible 
with the very old pgp 2.6 version. And those keys don't have subkeys, so it 
would only be a RSA key, not RSA/RSA (you recognize such a key by the 
different form of the fingerprint: it is shorter and usually displayed as 
groups of two (hex) characters, whereas a new key is displayed as groups of 4 
chars).

New-form RSA keys are still not compatible with old pg versions; but both 
new-style RSA and DSA/ELG keys are compatible with PGP 5.x and newer.

(List: what is the history of the missing 3.x and 4.x versions? Just curious.)

Greetings
-- vbi


-- 
featured link: http://fortytwo.ch/gpg/subkeys
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