Removing AES

[Adam Pavelec]

On Tuesday, February 10, 2004 12:28 PM [GMT-5=EST], David Shaw
<dshaw at jabberwocky.com> wrote:

> Interesting.  I've heard what I thought was every possible
> variation on the "this product won't handle files from that
> product because of suchandsuch preference" problem, and
> it's always turned out to be a misunderstanding of the
> problem.  This might just be the first time it's real.

If it really is, I will definitely need your assistance debugging it
all.

> That they cannot use GnuPG *or* PGP 8 generated keys is
> interesting. PGP 7.0.1 does support AES (it was the first
> version to do so).  I wonder if there is something else
> going on (are they using PGP 7.0.1 straight or via the SDK,
> etc).

Unfortunately, the other party is not too willing to discuss how their
system is configured, so the information I have from them is rather
limited.

>> Again, I am uncertain to the validity of this claim, but I
>> have since created a new key that I have set (and updated)
>> the preferences to exclude any AES algorithms.  If you are
>> interested, I will let you know if this new key is
>> interoperable with their current PGP install.

> Please do.  I'd be very interested to see what happens.

Sorry that it's taken this long to post any updates -- they've just
recently imported the new key (sans AES).  A few test files have been
sent, but they always fail to decrypt.  Here's the <obfuscated> output:

Encrypted with 1024-bit ELG-E key, ID 7A55G64B, created 2004-02-10
      "Fred Flintstone [sans AES] <fflintstone at bedrok.com>"
decryption failed: bad key

About the only thing I have noticed thus far is that it seems the file
is being encrypted to Fred Flintstone's Subkey.  Could this be the casue
of the failure?  I've asked the sender to encrypt to Fred's Primary key
a few times already, but apparently s/he can't figure out how to do it.

-Adam