how to create a symmetric cipher

[David Shaw]

On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 04:00:02PM -0600, Wei Wu [H] wrote:
> Thanks.
> 
> Well, my ultimate goal is to encrypt data, but I don't want to use
> passphrase to do it as I believe it is not secure enough.
> 
> So my questions are:
> 
> 1. How to create a symmetric key or cipher? With that, I may use another
> tool to encrypt/decrypt.
>
> 2. Can gpg be used to do key based encryption? Not passphrase based.

I'd like to help you, but I can't parse the question.  GPG uses both
passphrase and non-passphrase encryption in different circumstances.
I suggest you read the section on "Hybrid ciphers" in the manual
(http://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual.html), and hopefully that will
help clear up the confusion.

David