Hi everybody, I really don't know whether I'm asking a stupid question or not. It is about the length of a Public Key of GnuPG. Such that:
When I open the back-up of a public key in a text editor (say "pkey.asc" in Gedit), I see a long 'meaningless' text. It's OK. It is a perfectly justified text (I don't know why and how) and I or the editor can count how many lines there are. The longer the key strength is, the more lines there are (I guess). DSA type has constant strength: 1024 bytes. El-Gamal is between 1024 and 4096 bytes. If El-Gamal is 1024 bytes, then the number of lines of its public key in a text editor is around 25. If El-Gamal is 4096 bytes, then it is around 40. That is reasonable for me. However, I have checked many public keys from the server (pgp.mit.edu) and found some exceptions. For example, one of the Debian maintainers' public keys has El-Gamal 2048 bytes strength but has 340 lines (!!!?) when opened in a text editor. I've tried to obtain such a long key, but I couldn't. The questions are: - How can it be possible to obtain such a long text of a public key although it has 2048 bytes strength or whatever? - Is such a long text public key more secure than what we get regularly? My apologies regarding possible mistakes in the language... Sincerely, Burcu
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