Future plans for implementation of other algorithms

[Grant Olson]

On 01/25/2011 07:59 PM, Joseph Ziff wrote:
> Just out of curiosity (this might be the wrong mailing list for this so
> I apologize in advance if that is the case), are there any plans for
> implementing any other encryption/signing algorithms in GPG and if so
> what are they?

I think it's really the OpenPGP specs that drive the algorithms included
in gnupg.  There's no point in adding something if other OpenPGP
implementations don't understand it.

Right now there's a draft RFC to include Elliptic Curve Cryptography in
OpenPGP, but it hasn't been finalized yet.  That's probably the next big
algo.  Just this week on gnupg-devel, Werner announced a git branch
containing an implementation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography for 2.1.

Even after that code hits the gnupg mainline and the RFC gets approved,
it might be a while before you can reliably assume people can handle
ECC, given the number of people and distros that still default to 1.4.
(Not that I'm saying there's anything wrong with using 1.4; I just doubt
ECC will be back-ported.)


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