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Comparing ciphers (was: for the paranoid...)
Authored by: amacaulay on Jul 17, '03 02:16:27AM

4096 bit PGP isn't necessarily better (or worse) than 448 bit Blowfish. The 4096 bits of key in PGP are for the asymmetric algorithm (== public key) used and you would expect a key length of about 4000 for reasonable security. Symmetric algorithms like Blowfish ought to provide 128 bits of effective key to be safe from an exhaustive key search. With some modern algorithms that means use a real key length of 256 bits, so Blowfish with 448 bits of key is playing fairly safe.



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