[Gpg4win-users-en] Default cipher

[Werner Koch]

On Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:15, j.lysdal at gmail.com said:

> I tried to encrypt a file with gpg -c -v "randomfile" and it says gpg:
> using cipher 3DES.. I have no other config files so why is it not using
> CAST5?

Good catch.  GnuPG 2 diverts here from the documentation.

The reason is that GPG 1.4 has a build time configure option to build a
minimal gpg binary without CAST5 support.  While porting changes to
GnuPG we forgot to define the C macro USE_CAST5 and thus the default
changed to 3DES.  I'll chnage that.

In any case this is not a security problem. 3DES is however slower than
CAST5 and thus you may want to use it.  In general you should explicitly
give the cipher algorithm when using --symmetric (-c):

  gpg --symmetric --cipher-algo AES 



Shalom-Salam,

   Werner

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