ietf-openpgp
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Re: Changing GPG's default key type

2009-05-04 19:43:11

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One issue, of course, is that RSA is not a required key type in  
OpenPGP, so there could be some implementation out there that won't  
be able to handle it.  I'm not terribly concerned about this, as in  
practice, the vast majority of code has handled RSA just fine for  
the past decade, and if a particular user needs to generate a non- 
RSA key, they can still do so.
There are a few other details (RSA signatures are physically larger,  
etc), but I believe they are outweighed by the benefit of the larger  
key and additional hash flexibility.

PGP does precisely this now. The default you'll get when creating a  
new key is RSA 2048.

I'll invoke Jeff Schiller in this as well. The DSA/Elgamal keys are  
mandatory to implement. Mandatory to implement does not mean mandatory  
to use. It would be perfectly reasonable to make an RSA-only system  
that merely didn't hork up a hairball when it found a DSA key.

Many X.509 systems are like this too -- DSA is the mandatory-to- 
implement, but it's not clear that anyone has ever created a DSA  
certificate outside of interop testing. I'm sure someone can find some  
example that proves me literally wrong on that, but figuratively right.

These days, I see the effective -- ummm, I'm looking for the right  
word, I don't want to say "deprecate" -- minimization of integer  
discrete log. The world is pretty much integer RSA, and moving to  
elliptic curve discrete log.

        Jon

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