New vs Old (was Snake Oil)

[Bill Stewart]

At 08:53 AM 06/03/2003 -0700, bear wrote:
>IDEA is still a good cipher as far as I know, but PGP has been driven
>away from it in the US due to intellectual-property issues.  Rather than
>continue with incompatible versions for use inside/outside the USA, they're
>switching to CAST (although this is causing more, rather than less, version
>incompatibilities).

Actually, they switched to letting the user choose algorithms,
with CAST as the default but others such as 3DES available.
One of the compatibility issues is that people have written
patches for GPG that implement IDEA, so some users' systems support it
and others don't.  On the other hand, that mainly bothers the
people who've picked "only accept IDEA" for their symmetric algorithms.


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