Serpent Support

[Emilio Silva]

1) Are there any plans to include Serpent support in Gnupg ?The large
security margin of the cipher,the conservatism in its design and the good
reputation of the people who created it,assure added value to GnuPG.

2) When conventionally (-c) encrypting using twofish PGP 7.0.3 canŽt recognize
the passphrase (wrong passphrase...) ,I added --s2k-digest-algo sha1 (the hash
algorithm used by PGP 7.0.3) and the same happend.Using rijndael,cast5,3des all
works well.WhatŽs the problem?I use GnuPG 1.0.6.

3)Using conventional encryption "the key is derived from the passphrase"(Gnupg
handbook) but the exact procedure is not specified.I get two different encrypted
outputs encrypting with the same file,passphrase,options and algorithms.How
exactly does this work? (In conventional encryption).


Thanks.


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[Len Sassaman]

Post by Emilio Silva
1) Are there any plans to include Serpent support in Gnupg ?The large
security margin of the cipher,the conservatism in its design and the good
reputation of the people who created it,assure added value to GnuPG.

No. Serpent isn't part of OpenPGP, and having another cipher would cause
more backwards compatibility problems.

What's wrong with AES?

Post by Emilio Silva
3)Using conventional encryption "the key is derived from the
passphrase"(Gnupg handbook) but the exact procedure is not specified.I
get two different encrypted outputs encrypting with the same
file,passphrase,options and algorithms.How exactly does this work? (In
conventional encryption).

Check RFC 2440 for exact details on how the internals of OpenPGP work.


--Len.

[David Shaw]

Post by Emilio Silva
1) Are there any plans to include Serpent support in Gnupg ?The large
security margin of the cipher,the conservatism in its design and the good
reputation of the people who created it,assure added value to GnuPG.

To do this, Serpent must first be added to the OpenPGP spec. It does
little good to add it to GnuPG if other OpenPGP compatible programs
can't use it as well.

Post by Emilio Silva
2) When conventionally (-c) encrypting using twofish PGP 7.0.3 can?t recognize
the passphrase (wrong passphrase...) ,I added --s2k-digest-algo sha1 (the hash
algorithm used by PGP 7.0.3) and the same happend.Using rijndael,cast5,3des all
works well.What?s the problem?I use GnuPG 1.0.6.

Hmm. Try adding the "--openpgp" option as well. I suspect MDC
packets.

Post by Emilio Silva
3)Using conventional encryption "the key is derived from the passphrase"(Gnupg
handbook) but the exact procedure is not specified.I get two different encrypted
outputs encrypting with the same file,passphrase,options and algorithms.How
exactly does this work? (In conventional encryption).

See section 3.7 of RFC2440:

String-to-key (S2K) specifiers are used to convert passphrase
strings into symmetric-key encryption/decryption keys.

It gives lots of detail exactly how this works.

David