Safety of the key and it's length

[David Shaw]

On Jan 26, 2009, at 8:10 AM, Michał Gołębiowski wrote:

> I generated a gpg key using 'gpg --gen-key' (using GPG 1.4.6). What
> concerns me is that no matter how strong agorithm would I choose, it
> doesn't affect the size of the public & private key. It's probably ok,
> but I wonder - how safe is the private key having exported ASCII
> signature sized circa 2600 bytes? Public key is similar in size.

It's difficult to say from the information here.   If you want to know  
the size of your key, just do a --list-keys.  The size of the exported  
key (especially when ASCII armored) does not really give you the  
number you're looking for.  In the --list-keys output, the size of the  
key is the number after the "pub" and before the "D" or "R" that  
indicates key type.

David