Selecting cipher to generate a key pair

[vedaal at hush.com]

"Smith, Cathy" <cathy.smith () pnl ! gov> wrote on
Date: 2009-05-01 16:08:44 :

>I have a customer who can not accept our pgp public key.  
>They are asking for a specific cipher to be used in generating the 
public key.


this sounds like there might be a 'problem' ...

there are people who 'can' use 'any' cipher, but prefer a 
particular one,
or have a company policy to use a specific one, e.g .  AES-256 or 
3DES

and there are people whose programs can use only 'one' cipher, and 
no others

at the risk of taking 'wild guesses' ;-)
the only situations i can think of where a person 'cannot' accept 
anything other than one cipher are:

[1] a die-hard pgp 2.x user who needs a v3 key using IDEA
(yes, they still exist, but probably won't survive the move to 64 
bit systems)

[2] a company that is bound by some standard to use AES or 3DES
(i can't imagine any company really insisting on 'only Blowfish' 
and nothing else ;-) )
[ anyway, it was 'cracked on 24' and shown on network tv to have a 
'backdoor' ;-) ]

{please excuse the 'semi-off' geek humor, 
blowfish has 'no' backdoor and is still quite secure, 
no matter what hollywood writers say ;-)) }

if you have situation [1], you are out of luck using any current 
gnupg or pgp,
(there was a post on how to do this with an older gnupg version, 
but it would be much simpler to just use pgp2.x to generate it)

if you have situation [2],
it is much easier,

temporarily put the following 2 lines in your gpg.conf

expert
s2k-cipher-algo name ('name' is the name of the cipher your client 
wants)

then save your gpg.conf
and run

gpg --gen-key

the key will be generated with the cipher your client wants


if this still doesn't help,
then please post 'exactly' what you need done


vedaal

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