What is the recommended variant of PGP.

Adam Back adam at cypherspace.org
Sun Mar 18 08:34:28 PST 2001


I use pgp6.5.8 - it has a single command line program (pgp5.x had a
separate program for key management), and it has more pgp2.x like
command line options.

I would use gnuPG as the code is cleaner, more readable and smaller
but they're still refusing to include IDEA by default, even though
the IDEA license allows free non-commercial use.  (They added in RSA
as default since the RSA patent expired, but that's almost useless
without IDEA, as you still can't talk to pgp2.x).  There is an IDEA
module I think, so I suppose the best situation would be to add in
the IDEA module to gnuPG and use it.

Adam

On Sun, Mar 18, 2001 at 04:23:22AM +0000, David E. Smith wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 17 Mar 2001, Alan Olsen wrote:
> 
> > Gnu Privacy Guard is an Open Source PGP replacement.
> >
> > I have not examined interoperability with older versions of PGP though.
> > (I will be doing that soon though.)
> 
> The short version is this: GPG will work more-or-less transparently with
> PGP 5.x and 6.x, at least for all versions I've played with (most of 'em).
> It won't play nicely with PGP 2.6.x (or, AFAIK, any older version).
> 
> ...dave
> 





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list