Multiple symetric cyphers
Derek Atkins
warlord at MIT.EDU
Thu Jan 12 09:13:28 PST 1995
> Well, it's no weaker than current systems. PGP stores the cipher type
> in the source code: it's always IDEA. One should allow, however, the
> cipher type to be empty alongside the data so that another tool can
> store cipher information.
Actually, a slight correction. PGP does have an algorithm byte
for the encryption algorithm; this byte is inside the RSA block.
(It doesn't have to be RSA, either, but thats a different story).
So long as you use a public key to encrypt, you get this byte. If
you just use PGP -c, using the current implementation, you do not
get a type byte. Oops.
My point is that although the current implementation doesn't have
multiple encryption schemes, that doesn't mean that it can't have
them...
-derek
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