PGP/GnuPG Wierdness report...

[Werner Koch]

"Caskey L. Dickson" <caskey at technocage.com> writes:
 
> As you know I've been experimenting with (and documenting) PGP/GnuPG
> integration and a short while ago I had a minor setback.  I was getting
> the errors about my keys not being valid for encryption by PGP.  

PGP can't handle type 20 keys (ElGamal sign + encrypt) and it is
unlikely that they will change this behaviour.  For GNUPG both keys
are the same and there is no technical reason not to accept a type 20
key for encryption.  If you use the default selection for key
generation gnupg will generate a type 16 key, but if you add a subkey,
you may accidently choose type 20 (ElGamal sign+encrypt)

> date of my new subkey had been set to 10 days by me and reflected as such
> inside of gnupg, however inside of pgp it was displayed as much, much
> longer (sometime in 1999). 

I have to check this.

> My prior success with sending messages to my friend may have been affected
> by the fact that he was using v.5.5 of PGP, not 5.0 as I am.  Currently I
> am unable to do ascii armored messages that can be successfully decrypted.
> PGP is *awful* about error messages.  If it doesn't find any input that it

Yes really and the Windoze version 5.5 is even more worse.

We have to look at the differences of 5.0 to 5.5 armors

> Does anyone else out there successfully communicate with PGP users?

Yes, I did this to check the DES implementation and it worked - don't
know whether I checked with ascii armors.


  Werner