My comments below... --- Nick MacDonald | NMD on IRC i6t4@jupiter.sun.csd.unb.ca | PGP 2.1 Public key available via finger On Sat, 3 Apr 1993, J. Michael Diehl wrote:

I am really learning to love PGP, and I haven't even used it much yet! I'm insisting that all my friends get keys. But....

I have been 'introducing' my friends to PGP too... I figure that its no good if I have a key, but no one to use it with... :-) Its amazing how many people will take the time to play with an interesting new toy...

I would like to set up two secret keys for myself. One 512 bits long and another 1024 bits long. I'll distribute the short one. I'll give the long one to trusted and close friends. I'm having difficulty setting it up so that pgp defaults to using the short key to encrypt stuff. Note that I want the same user id for both, but perhapse with a "secure" flag in the user id of the large key. How can I do this?

I'm not too sure here... but PGP should default to using the newest (youngest) key on you private key ring... If you have two of them with the same name, I'm not sure how you could choose other than the first... The trick here might be to a a key size option to PGP, to say I want the key that is (or is at least) n bits in size.

Can we get someone to compile and distribute pgp for the amoeba, er, I mean Amiga? ;^) My friend has one, but no C compiler.

I'll not get into computer wars... I'll just say that I'll take an Amiga over an IBM clone any day! >;-) As far as I can tell.. there are folx out there that make sure the Amiga version goes public pretty soon after a new version is released... I've hade 2.2 since about 3 days after I knew it was released... There are a series on AmiNet "mirrors" all over the world, the one that most IBM'ers would recognize right off being wuarchive.wustle.edu (128.252.135.4) in /pub/aminet/util/crypt.

Some suggestions for future versions...

I have some options on some of your ideas, but I'll save them for another post at another time.. :-)

J. Michael Diehl writes:

...

I would like to use pgp on the mainframes, but don't want to store my secret key on their disks. Would it be possible to have pgp accept it's secret key via stdin. I could do an ascii upload of my secret key and never expose my key to disk-storage.

This is even more dangerous than storing it on the disks of a multi-user machine. Unless you are running in a kerberos environment it is trivial to snoop your upload off the network, and even without that weakness you are exposing yourself to the same problem that the docs mention (it is really pretty easy to scan someone's terminal input) only you are giving them the key outright instead of only giving them the passphrase to your key.

Point taken.

Bad idea.

Sure is. Thanx. -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: 2.2 mQBNAiu21SIAAAECAMKkKKP4JIxSPR7rOUZ7mbi6yDPfFa7T6zOtOBX8iI939tIU 9JFTxdyvTejK3qmYDGozNaqySQ/0++nGqZgikcsABRG0LUouIE1pY2hhZWwgRGll aGwsIG1lLCA8bWRpZWhsQHRyaXRvbi51bW4uZWR1Pg== =YquS -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----