Re: how to create a symmetric cipher

[Joseph Oreste Bruni]

When you encrypt to a person's public key you are not using the public key to encrypt the data. First, a random session key is generated and used to encrypt the data using a symmetric cipher. Then only the session key is encrypted using the public key and appended to the file. The recipient uses his private key to decrypt the session key which is then used to decrypt the data via the symmetric cipher. This way you avoid passing symmetric keys in the clear.

Joe


On Nov 14, 2006, at 3:04 PM, Wei Wu [H] wrote:

If you are looking to build a custom solution, you might be better off looking at the OpenSSL crypto API.

Thank you. As I said in my other posts, I don't want to use passphrase based

encryption, and am looking for key based solution.


is more efficient.

Regards,
WW


-----Original Message-----

Also I don't need a private/public key-pair based solution as symmetric key From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:gnupg-users- [EMAIL PROTECTED]

On Behalf Of Joseph Oreste Bruni
Sent: Tuesday, November 14, 2006 3:41 PM
To: gnupg-users@gnupg.org
Subject: Re: how to create a symmetric cipher

gpg --symmetric --encrypt

The default is CAST5, but you can specify the algorithm using --
cipher-algo

-Joe


On Nov 14, 2006, at 12:52 PM, Wei Wu [H] wrote:

Hi there,

I want to create a symmetric cipher such as AES to encrypt some
data, and
think gpg (GnuPG Version 1.4.2.1) may do this. But I found it gives
only
three options, none is symmetric. I would appreciate if anyone can
point me
to another or way to do it?

Regards,
WW

gpg --gen-key
   (1) DSA and Elgamal (default)
   (2) DSA (sign only)
   (5) RSA (sign only)



_______________________________________________
Gnupg-users mailing list
Gnupg-users@gnupg.org
http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users

_______________________________________________
Gnupg-users mailing list
Gnupg-users@gnupg.org
http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users

smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature

_______________________________________________
Gnupg-users mailing list
Gnupg-users@gnupg.org
http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users