Encryption Algorithm for GnuPG?

[Damien Goutte-Gattat]

On Sun, May 26, 2019 at 11:30:18PM -0700, Procopius via Gnupg-users wrote:
>What is the encryption engine for the current GnuPG.

There’s no single symmetric encryption algorithm. OpenPGP allows a set 
of algorithms: 3DES, IDEA, CAST5, AES, Blowfish, Twofish, and Camellia 
[1,2]. GnuPG supports all of them.


>I know IDEA is proprietary so that can’t be used, is this correct?

All patents on IDEA have now expired and IDEA is supported by GnuPG.


>If it’s NIST AES that is under the US Government? Wouldn’t that be in 
>danger of a US back door in the algorithm?

Rijndael was actually designed by a team of Belgian cryptologists. NIST 
evaluated it amongst the other candidate ciphers of the AES competition 
and eventually selected it as the winner, but was not involved in its 
design. [3]


- Damien

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4880#section-9.2

[2] 
https://www.iana.org/assignments/pgp-parameters/pgp-parameters.xhtml#pgp-parameters-13

[3] 
https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2000/10/commerce-department-announces-winner-global-information-security
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