Cipher v public key.

[David Gray]

Hi all, 

Just starting a project where one of our customers will be sending 
encrypted data files from their windows based servers to be 
decrytpted on our VMS servers.   

They have not yet decided which product they will use for for encryption 
but I'm hoping to steer them down the GnuPG path as I've done a quick 
test and it works perfectly between those two operating systems.  

One question they have asked which I'm not sure of the answer is that can 
GnuPG handle the AES256 alogorithm?  The gpg --version on my VMS system 
shows... 

$ gpg --version
gpg (GnuPG) 1.2.3
Copyright (C) 2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain
conditions. See the file COPYING for details.
 
Home: /SYS$LOGIN/gnupg
Supported algorithms:
Pubkey: RSA, RSA-E, RSA-S, ELG-E, DSA, ELG
Cipher: 3DES, CAST5, BLOWFISH, AES, AES192, AES256, TWOFISH
Hash: MD5, SHA1, RIPEMD160, SHA256
Compression: Uncompressed, ZIP, ZLIB


AES256 is listed as a cipher but not a public key?  What is the 
The difference?  I was hoping to use asymmetric keys with me 
Giving the public key to the customer.  As mentioned before this all 
Works fine but I'm not sure which alogorithm I'm using when encrypting. 

So after all that my question really is, how do I set the alogorithm to
AES256 
in windows so I can test decrypts on VMS? 

Thanks in advance
Dave