[lug] pgp and gpg compatibility

[C Menzes]

that was exactly the case. it looks like rh7 ships with 1.0.2. 
redhat's ftp site has an rpm for 1.0.4 in the updates directory.
can you offer a brief explanation of how IDEA is used compared to RSA? i
do recall that rsa's patent was lifted a few months ago, however i'm not
clear on the diff between a session left encryption algorithm compared to
a that applied to a key.

regards -cjm

On Wed, 20 Dec 2000, Michael J. Pedersen wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 20, 2000 at 12:36:19PM -0600, C Menzes wrote:
> > i am having some issues importing pgp created public keys into my gpg
> > keyring. i am wondering if this is because gpg does not support IDEA? is
> > this correct? do i need to run two seperate encryption apps depending on
> > who is sending me information?
> 
> This will hardly be a final, definitive answer on the topic, but here's the
> main thing:
> 
> gpg does not natively support idea, due to it's status as a patented
> algorithm. pgp, being the commerical product that it is, does have support for
> the idea algorithm. However, this is neither here nor there. This is a session
> level algorithm, rather than a public key one, and is not used in any fashion
> with the public keys.
> 
> The issue that you have is likely to be one instead of RSA compatibility. RSA
> just attained patent free status within the past 3 months, which means that
> gpg has only had this support for less than three months (officially. There
> were other ways around this mess before then, though).
> 
> The likely cause does lend itself to a simple solution, at least: Get the
> latest version of gpg, version 1.0.4, from any of your usual choice of places,
> including (but not limited to):
> 
> 	Your distribution vendor
> 	http://www.gnupg.org
> 	Any mirror site (http://www.gnupg.org/mirrors.html)
> 
> And then try the imports. Should that fail, you've got some more serious
> issues than that going on, and I'd need to know which version of gpg you're
> using, what modules you have loaded, and what keys you are trying to import
> (and from where). Most specifically, the output of the following commands
> would help:
> 	gpg --version
> 	uname -a
> 
> Hope this helps out somewhat, at least.
> 
>