[82333] in Cypherpunks
Re: New PGP signatures
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (tzeruch@ceddec.com)
Mon Jun 23 18:21:25 1997
Date: Mon, 23 Jun 1997 17:39:34 -0400
From: tzeruch@ceddec.com
To: cypherpunks mailing list <cypherpunks@Algebra.COM>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.3.89.9706231057.A3379-0100000@netcom22>
Reply-To: tzeruch@ceddec.com
On Mon, 23 Jun 1997, Lucky Green wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Jun 1997, Rick Osborne wrote:
>
> > bennett_t1@popmail.firn.edu wrote:
> > >some asshole forgot to make PGP 5.0 freeware RSA key-generating
> >
> > Okay, silly question here, but what's to stop someone from adding that
> > capability once the source is available? (And if they knew they were going
> > to publish the source, why not just add the capability in the first place?)
>
> Because there is no reason for PGP to enourage people to generate new
> RSA/MD5 keys when MD5 is about to go downhill.
They could have supported RSA/SHA if they wanted to. They also put 3DES
and IDEA support as options in the manual (but not in the freeware or
tryit versions that I can see).
I hope the international generic version - after it is scanned and
modified - has many useful "upward compatible" options which will refuse
to interoperate with the commercial windows/mac version.
And then someone can write an interoperability spec and the next version
of everything will talk to everything else.
