2.6.3i

[Johan Wevers]

David Gray wrote:

>Thanks for your response.  I'm interested to read that PGP2 can use RSA as
>well as IDEA.  The people at the other end of this project are saying
>(without too much conviction) that they can ONLY use IDEA. 

PGP has always been a hybrid cipher system: the data is encrypted with a
symmetric cipher (IDEA in this case), and the key of this encryption is
sent with the message, encrypted with an asymmetric cipher (RSA here).
This is done because RSA and El Gamal are too slow for bulk data.

-- 
ir. J.C.A. Wevers         //  Physics and science fiction site:
johanw at vulcan.xs4all.nl   //  http://www.xs4all.nl/~johanw/index.html
PGP/GPG public keys at http://www.xs4all.nl/~johanw/pgpkeys.html