diskperf-y ?

[FRANK HUBENY]

Hello;

Thank you for your respones.  I was just wondering because when I used
"pgp", it told you how big.  Some would even go as high as a "8k" key.
I did try and make one once it took 36 hours to make a "8k" RSA key.
And "1" hour to encrypt a small file.

My version of "gpg" does not allow one to generate a "rsa" key.  I
suppose a future version will allow one to generate a different key.  A
newer version of pgp263 does allow one to generate lots of different
ones.  But I also understand that I can change the cypher used in "gpg".

<><
Frank D. Hubeny


>    according to keygen.c the largest key is 4096 bits.  The main
reason
>    why you might not want to use a number so large is the amount of
time
> to
>    generate the public and private keys and also, to a much smaller
> extent,
>    the amount of time to encrypt a message with the public key.
>
>    Of course the longer your key is, in general, the more security you
>    will have.  RSA's security depends on very very large integers that
>    are the product of 2 prime numbers that are nearly equal in bit
> length.