Interoperability

[Werner Koch]

On Tue, 7 May 2002 23:31:27 +0200, Philipp =?utf-8?q?G=C3=BChring?= said:

> values. Which algorithm should be the default in all implementations out 
> there? (same thing for similar detail questions)

That is easy to decide.  We have to support the algorithms marked as
MUST and SHOULD and should not activly support any OPTIONAL
algorithms.

There are 2 exceptions: IDEA is SHOULD but there are very good reasons
(even given in the RFC) not to support it; it was included to achieve
some backward compatibility to PGP 2.  The other one is AES which is
the proposed successor of 3DES and as such it makes a lot of sense to
support it - I am pretty sure that everyone in the OpenPGP WG agrees
with AES.

This leaves us with: 

3-DES, CAST5 and AES

SHA-1

DSS, ElGamal and RSA

gpg 1.0.7 does use these algorithms.  Being Free Software it won't
make any sense to remove support for other algorithms; for sure
someone would release a version with support for them.  So I decided
that we will still keep options to enable the other algorithms.  And
well, I even added RSA sign+encrypt to the key genration menu (with
--expert).


  Werner