On 09/03/2013 04:49 PM, Peter Lebbing wrote: > To expand on what Johan Wevers said: symmetric ciphers do not change the > length > of the encrypted text (by more than the block size). They certainly do not > compress. Usually, data is compressed before encrypting it (compressing it > after > is pretty useless). If you set your key preferences to not allow compression, > files encrypted to your key will not be smaller than the original files.
NO TWO PEOPLE ARE THE SAME! The main thing I am saying is to make choices work for you but at the same time consider the others you interact with. Taking my choices is NOT any better than the ones on the Debian page. You have to find your own. If you have a problem with that I will don my Psychologist cap and do analysis instead. I won't answer the other questions because you have grossly misinterpreted me. My major point was that what was picked in that list had the idea that bigger is better and biggest is best. Zipping was required. I dropped my 4096R keys and went from them to 2048R more not from the point of view of which is safer but more from the point of view of being reasonable for others. Ditto for going from the SHA512 hash down to SHA256. Now I realize that there is a lot more going on in GnuPG than just using sha256sum and sha512sum. Nevertheless, doing tests on creating the hashes on 1000 files made it quite evident that SHA256 wasn't that much of a burden over SHA1. But sha512sum consumed gobs more time than using sha256sum. So I switched not only the key sizes but the DIGEST to SHA256 as my first choice. How bad was SHA512 in other ways? There were some times the detached ".sig" files were as large as or even larger than the base files! But it was NOT what ever I thought was the best for me security-wise driving the decision. It was the needs and desires of others. You don't live in a vacuum. Having that much extra for the task at hand was gross over-kill. There is nothing wrong with 3DES from my point of view. There may be from other people's point of view and that includes people making government specifications that ignore the fact that CAST5 has not had as much crypton-analysis done on it than has been done with 3DES. Have you ever heard the statement "there is the right way, the wrong way, and the Navy way"? In that case it is NOT your choice driving the decision. If you were not supposed to use 3DES then by golly you better not use it. Didn't I make the statement that you are far more likely to lose your secret documents via a hacker infecting your machine and stealing them that way than attacking any of these ciphers? Didn't I say you are more likely to have somebody go into your house and attach a key-logger to the end of your keyboard than by them attacking any of these ciphers directly? Why did you ignore these statements? I only mentioned that 3DES should be considered for low powered machines. That statement stands. If you want 3DES as your first choice on an umpteen core machine go ahead. Other people with lower powered machines will be delighted with your choice. I will get it implicitly only when that is all they can do but choose not to add it to my list of ciphers. Don't feel people have to pick what you picked. I hope they pick what works best for them and the others they interact with. My whole point is that they lined up things with a bigger is better and biggest is best mentality. There are times when other factors are just as important as the security is. There are also the times as in AES vs. AES-256 where bigger doesn't always mean better - at least according to Bruce Schneier's thinking. If you want to argue that point argue it with Bruce, not me. Me? I took his advice and moved the AES to the head of the AES line-up. I was about to drop the AES-192 for one of the Camellia ciphers (see my PS at the end). It is called free choice but I will make it considering the needs of others, not just slap down the biggest one or the smallest one. As for the zip algorithms I was thinking more along the lines of what is going on in email and the fact that I much prefer 7-zip over all the zip algorithms you can specify. You will NEVER get 7-zip in GnuPG. Now please don't misunderstand me on that as well! All I am saying is that 7-zip will never be added to GnuPG and I prefer 7-zip. So I will do my compressing outside of GnuPG. But there is more going on. First for what is going on in email using one of the malware I got yesterday pretending to come from the Royal Bank of Scotland: 8859 Sep 4 01:26 base64.zip 11978 Sep 4 01:25 DOC_Sue_Wagner.bin 16870 Sep 4 01:21 DOC_Sue_Wagner.eml 8859 Sep 4 01:18 DOC_Sue_Wagner.zip The DOC_Sue_Wagner.eml was the email saved as is from Thunderbird. In adddition to the ASCII-fied zip it has a fair sized headers, MIME markings and other things. The file named DOC_Sue_Wagner.bin was the eml file stripped down to just the ASCII zip. The base64.zip was the conversion from the bin file to a zip file using base64 -i -d. The DOC_Sue_Wagner.zip file was saved as is from Thunderbird. DOC_Sue_Wagner.zip and base64.zip are the same: $ sha1sum base64.zip DOC_Sue_Wagner.zip 1a060a72519e5bf171a45fd642f9a83bc9a6a64d base64.zip 1a060a72519e5bf171a45fd642f9a83bc9a6a64d DOC_Sue_Wagner.zip $ hexcmp base64.zip DOC_Sue_Wagner.zip # nothing spit out and zero returned which means all of the # nth bytes are always the same. But in this case it is a wash. Whether zipped or not there just isn't that much more of saving when things go to ASCII so why bother? All that does is slow both you and them down. If it is a super huge file then I just zip it on the outside with 7-zip. Both 7-zip and bzip2 beat gzip and zip although there are times when the orders are different. On average bzip2 usually is about 10% to 15% larger than 7-zip, gzip is larger than bzip2 and zip is the largest of all. But one more thing 7-zip does for me is throw out the UID:GID. Thus due to the email considerations and what I said pick your own zip poison for GnuPG. For me it will continue to be nothing. Like I said, there is no one BEST choice for everybody. If you disagree with somebody else's choice do it without being disagreeable. HHH PS I think I am going to revoke my keys and just say to hell with OpenPG encryption. It isn't worth it. _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users