-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hello again. I have been too busy to post very much to the net recently, but I'm still here. As an experiment, I wanted to hack PGP 2.3A to produce and use 2048-bit keys. There was nothing sophisticated about this hack. I just changed MAX_BIT_PRECISION in mpilib.h to 4096, upgraded the POOLSIZE in random.c to 1024, and changed the version number to "2.3b" in pgp.c so I would know when I am running the hacked version. Generating 2048 bit keys is very painful, because over 260 bytes need to be typed for the pool. It took over five minutes to generate the key after the pool was full. Once created, though, encryption and decryption are not significantly slower than with 1024 bit keys, at least not on my 486DX2/66 running Linux 1.0. It only took 3 seconds to encrypt pgpdoc1.txt (using -ea) and 8 seconds to decrypt the result. Of course, the large keys created with "2.3b" are not compatible with any other version. I attempted to use the PSEUDORANDOM compiling flag, but pgp refused to link. I suppose I should put some more effort into resolving this problem. I am sending this note out for those who would like to play with big keys, but did not want to take the time to hunt through the source looking for the necessary values to change. Please treat this as an *experiment*. It is entirely possible that "2.3b" is potentially insecure, because I have not made any attempt to locate all of the memory-erasing routines that clean up after key generation and encryption and confirm that they erase all of the new memory used. I hope that the more sophisticated cypherpunks will not sneer too much at my feeble beginner's efforts. I would like to hear from anyone who performs this experiment, perhaps with a more sophisticated hack, and does timing tests on other machines, especially slower machines like 386's and 68020's. Lady Ada -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLd53bKXNQdJx1hMZAQHaEwQApOWGq0P+OqsgYolbZrjaIWhrghhV9KcY X5DqgKK8NLdND1aR17JVwUEQeo3eFok6NTjioiLg4sIQdTQNOX8Nd9bQgMxswyyi EIe/6Ki9YrxlArteUoc0zy7MaB0V1sxH3CdvEQmLnr8XKU03pnD7FCZXedjhic93 +Tt4fNrNGYk= =LmWA -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----