another question, and a small patch

[Vladimir Vukicevic]

Hi.. thanks for the quick response :-)

Werner Koch wrote:
> You are doing public-key encryption on large data blocks - this is the
> problem.  Nearly all encryption tools don't do this but use a hybrid
> scheme:  You generate a random session key, encrypt this using a
> public-key algorithm and then you encrypt the bulk data with a
> symmetric algorithm like Twofish.  You have to take care about many
> other things too - otherwise you don't get real security.

Yeah, I realized my idiocy right around 2am.. everything is MUCH faster
now,
but I'm running into a weird bug where gcry_pk_decrypt() crashes UNLESS
I do
a gcry_sexp_dump(key); right before it. If the key doesn't get printed,
decrypt crashes. If it gets printed, everything works fine. Bizzare.

> If you are looking for a data format for encryption; you should
> take several things into account:
> 
>   o Is it an synchronous (tcp connection) or asynchronous (store and
>     forward, email) communication channel.
>   o Is it a long term connection or is the connection establish
>     many times (ssh vs. http)
>   o What is the size of the payload
>   o Do you need perfect forward security
>   o ...
> 
> OpenPGP is a good protocol for asyncronous communication.  TLS is
> good for HTTP like transactions and the SSH v2 protocols are fine for
> long term connections.  If you are going for the SSh protocols; I have
> a started with a library implementation which handles all the protocol
> stuff (GSTI - GNU Secure Transport Initiative).

Well, it's running directly over HTTP -- but we need public key support;
also, there is unfortunately no TLS/SSL library that is fully GPL'd,
something that is important
to us as our resulting application is to be released under the GPL.

> > I also ran into some problems with the sexp implementation.. The
> 
> No wonder.  I should put the brown bag over my head.  Thanks for the
> patches, I'll take them into account.
> 
> BTW, I started writing some example code for libgcrypt.

Cool.. that'll be nice.

I'm a little unclear as to the different versions of GnuPG -- what is
the planned release date for the one that includes libgcrypt?

	- Vlad