How Do I Do This PGP/GPG Thing?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>

| Jerry Feldman wrote:
| > On 01/17/2009 12:40 PM, Bruno Wolff III wrote:

| > > One other note is that the original version of PGP used the IDEA
| > > encryption
| > > algorithm. This algorithm is covered by a patent for a couple of years
| > > yet.

That is true

| > > So the supplied version of gpg in many distros is not going to be able to
| > > handle stuff ecnrypted with the original gpg and some old keys. This
| > > probably
| > > won't be a problem for you.

It was a problem for me this week.  I had to build a version of gpg
with IDEA support.

(As I was doing so, I flipped on the TV and came in on an episode of
NCIS at a point where they claimed this box they were about to sell to
the bad guys supported the IDEA cipher for its legacy SAs generated by
pgp.  The actual sentence didn't actually make sense but they crammed
a lot of crypto words into it.)

| > To make a long story short, some of the technology behind public key
| > encryption is based on a patent owned by MIT and leased to RSA. The
| > technology was developed by Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman
| > who were at MIT at the time

(RSA == Rivest Shamir Adleman)

| > although public key encryption was originally
| > proposed at Stanford.

Publicly proposed (UK GCHQ folks invented it earliert but it was not
disclosed).

| AFAIK the patent expired last year...

The US patent on RSA expired in 2000 (I have a tee shirt celebrating that
day).  It wasn't patented in other countries.

IDEA's patents expire in 2010 and 2011 according to wikipedia.