# gnupg alternative for symmetric encryption?



## stratacast1 (Jul 3, 2019)

Ever since I started using *NIX in 2013 I've been using gnupg to do symmetric file encryption just as another layer when moving files from machine to machine. This last week I talked to a guy who has a background in cryptography and mentioned he doesn't trust OpenPGP tools because there's some key derivation flaw in the standard. Anyone know of this? I didn't get much chance to get more info and if this is true, I'd like more info...but whether this is proven or not, it made me think if there are other standard tools that are used for symmetric encryption of files and what they are? I think you can also use OpenSSL but would that really be much better than OpenPGP?


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## robotchaos (Jul 4, 2019)

I'm not a cryptographic expert, but I hope to at least provide something that can be of interest to you, saltpack.


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## Crivens (Jul 4, 2019)

I heard one of our professors for cryptology utter something about DES and how there was no description on how the permutation matrices were chosen. And then there were our spooks saying single DES was good enough for business topics and there was no need for tripple DES or 4k RSA. You draw your own conclusions from that.


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## stratacast1 (Jul 6, 2019)

robotchaos said:


> I'm not a cryptographic expert, but I hope to at least provide something that can be of interest to you, saltpack.


I think I came across this briefly in a discussion somewhere, I'll check it out, thanks!



Crivens said:


> I heard one of our professors for cryptology utter something about DES and how there was no description on how the permutation matrices were chosen. And then there were our spooks saying single DES was good enough for business topics and there was no need for tripple DES or 4k RSA. You draw your own conclusions from that.



Could definitely doubt the cryptologists opinion if he said that DES was okay hehe. I mean, the algorithm is sound but the keyspace is so small for DES that it wouldn't take long to crack it. I'd like to see if I can find more info on why PGP is not considered to be all that safe. Maybe I can follow up on what some of that saltpack stuff says.


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