Changing preferences

[David Shaw]

On Sep 24, 2008, at 8:47 AM, Kevin Hilton wrote:

> Thanks for the quoted sections from Applied Cryptography.  Just to
> throw more fuel on the fire, however from the quoted material, it
> would seem that Serpent and 3DES have a lot in common -- slowness, but
> security.  Again a lot of ciphers are already included in GnuPG, many
> it seems for historical reasons, that could be made read only as many
> have suggested.  How a cipher like cast5, but not Serpent could be
> included, other than for historical reasons, is beyond me.

CAST5 was invented in 1996.
The code that eventually evolved into the OpenPGP standard was started  
in 1996.
Serpent was invented in 1998.

Serpent didn't exist when it might have been added.  When PGP 3 was  
being developed, they used three ciphers: 3DES was the slow-and- 
conservative one, IDEA was the good-but-patented one, and CAST5 was  
the good-and-free one.

David