Why is there a subkey and a selfsig in a new key?

[Werner Koch]

On Tue,  8 Nov 2011 16:06, rjh at sixdemonbag.org said:

> IIRC, it was a response to laws like the United Kingdom's RIPA which
> allows the authorities to demand encryption keys from users.  By

No, that is not the case.  The RIP act was first introduced in 2000
whereas the OpenPGP draft was first defined in autumn 1997.

A technical case which required the use of two keys was the patent
status of RSA.  The DH patents expired in April 97 which allowed to do
patent unencumbered public key crypto.  For signature DSA was a natural
choice; DSA however can't be used for encryption (at least it is not
designed for that) and thus Elgamal was used for encryption.


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner

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