
The Internet PEM (Privacy Enhanced Mail) standard uses the concept which Dean Tribble mentioned of multiple encryption (using each recipient's public key) of a single session key which encrypts the message. PGP's data structures do not currently provide for this but could be extended pretty easily to allow it. On the entropy measure - I thought entropy was how many bits of information you get per character. Encrypted binary text would be pretty close to 8 bits per character. The RFC1113 Ascii encoding used by PGP reduces this to 6 bits per character (e.g. a character set with 64 printable characters) neglecting line separators and message beginnings and endings. So there should be a little less than 6 bits per character for encrypted, Ascii-encoded messages. Hal 74076.1041@compuserve.com

Hal:
Ascii encoding used by PGP reduces this to 6 bits per character (e.g. a character set with 64 printable characters) neglecting line separators and message beginnings and endings. So there should be a little less than 6 bits per character for encrypted, Ascii-encoded messages.
Hal is, of course, right. I was getting myself confused between entropy lost in the encoding and the entropy of the encoding. The channel uses up two bits of entropy per character in the encoding. What's left is six bits. As punishment for getting this so egregiously wrong, I'm going to post some C code for measuring entropy so that you all can play with it. Eric
participants (2)
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Eric Hughes
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Hal