Enigmail speed geeking

[Peter Lebbing]

On 2015-03-13 15:31, Brian Minton wrote:
> If a key is generated externally, a backup can be taken before the 
> key
> is moved to the card.  For a key generated on the card, there is (by
> design), no way to extract the secret key, including for the purpose 
> of
> backing it up

When you ask GnuPG to create an on-card key, it will ask you whether 
you want to keep a backup of the key or not.

If you choose to proceed without a backup, the key is generated 
on-card. I consider this the inferior of the two methods because I trust 
the RNG of Linux much more than I trust the RNG of a smartcard that 
costs a few euros to produce.

If you choose to have a backup, GnuPG will create the key just as it 
would for a normal on-disk key, and then upload that key to the 
smartcard and keep a backup file. This thus uses the RNG of your PC; on 
which I would be running Linux.

You could then discard the backup if you want to have the quality of 
the RNG of the PC but don't want the backup.

HTH,

Peter.

-- 
I use the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) in combination with Enigmail.
You can send me encrypted mail if you want some privacy.
My key is available at 
<http://digitalbrains.com/2012/openpgp-key-peter>