Question about history of hash and cipher collections

[vedaal at hush.com]

David Shaw dshaw at jabberwocky.com
wrote on Tue Jan 15 18:09:49 CET 2008 :

>GPG does use 3DES as the default cipher for encryption.  That 
>behavior
>is required by OpenPGP.


does it?

this is what i get when i try a symmetrical encryption using the 
defaults:

c:\gnupg>gpg -c -a c:\jat.txt
gpg: using cipher CAST5
gpg: writing to `c:\jat.txt.asc'

here is the output:

-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32)
Comment: Acts of Kindness better the World, and protect the Soul
passphrase: jat

jA0EAwMC1u7kYt5GDPpgySjAcWW2AhrskPs0zteJPzScCwtwqsgEYdYQeY7Tq9sQ
4NKAHU4Urql+
=3qDE
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----


here is the gpg.conf i'm using, in case i overlooked something:

##gpg2go  drive
comment "Acts of Kindness better the World, and protect the Soul"
keyring v:\z\147\home\pubring.gpg
secret-keyring v:\z\147\home\secring.gpg
no-default-keyring
trustdb-name v:\z\147\home\trustdb.gpg
#cipher-algo TWOFISH
#digest-algo SHA256
#compress-algo ZIP
load-extension v:\z\147\idea.dll
homedir v:\z\147\home
local-user 0x5AA20C866A589A97!
#hidden-encrypt-to 0x5AA20C866A589A97
#s2k-cipher-algo twofish

#s2k-digest-algo SHA256
#
#cert-digest-algo SHA256
#digest-algo sha1
#digest-algo ripemd160
verbose
verbose
ignore-crc-error
ignore-mdc-error
show-session-key
expert
#throw-keyids
#try-all-secrets
#default-key 6A589A97!


it has been my experience that the cipher used for symmetric 
encryption is the one that is named in s2k-cipher-algo  unless 
otherwise specified,
and if unspecified, and no s2k-cipher-algo is specified either,
then it reverts to CAST-5

(the above test was done using gnupg 1.4.8,
haven't gotten around to changing the folder names yet ;-) )

vedaal