DSA and ECC

[Werner Koch]

On Tue, 23 Mar 2004 20:36:12 -0500 (EST), Atom 'Smasher' said:

> out of curiousity, what are the reasons that new algorithms get added to
> the spec?

Twofish was added as the first freely available 128 bit block cipher
and partly due to personal communication between Phil Zimmermann and
Bruce Schneier.

AES has been added because it is the new standard block cipher and
algorithm numbers have been reserved for it right with the first
OpenPGP drafts.

SHA256 et al. have been added because they are required for for
certain applications and they match properties of the new block
ciphers.

Other algorithms or reserved algorithm numbers are even dropped from
the latest drafts.

We don't need to add a >1024 bit DSA because it is just a matter of
the keysize and OpenPGP does not give limits on that. We have not yet
added support for >1024 bit DSA because we actually use DSS (basically
DSA + SHA1) and like to wait for the official specifications of >1024
bit DSA , although they details are pretty obvious.


  Werner