Procedure of deriving a pruivate key from the password

[Robert J. Hansen]

> I only have a vague and incomplete understandig of the procedure in
> which GnuPG derives a private key from a password.

Private keys aren't derived from passphrases.

> After the last iteration the resulting hash value is mangled. The result
> of this mangling process ist the private key.

The result is used as an AES256 key and used to decrypt the private key
file.