Any way to get smaller key sizes?

[David Shaw]

On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 06:21:57PM -0400, Jason Barrett wrote:
> Good afternoon,
> 
> I am using GPG for encryption of sensitive information in a database.  Some
> members of the development team are concerned about the space taken up by
> strings encrypted with 1024-bit keys and would like to sacrifice some
> security by reducing that key size.  GnuPG will not let me do this with the
> --gen-keys command; is there any way I can get around that and create, say,
> a 512-bit key?

Yes, but it's almost impossible to answer this because it's not clear
what you're doing.  Are you storing the keys or the results?  1024 bit
keys with what algorithm?  The only key type that is locked to 1024
bits is DSA and that's a signing algorithm, so encryption never comes
into the equation.

Say what you're doing, and we can help a lot.

David