Re: pgp, edi, s/mime

[Raph Levien <raph@cs.berkeley.edu>]

Hal Finney wrote:
> I have recently gone to work for PGP, Inc.

This is extremely good news. I publicly take back a lot of my pessimism
about the PGP project.

> PGP 3 will support both discrete log and RSA cryptography.  It will
> interoperate with both, so that when you send a message to someone
> who has an RSA key, it will use RSA, and when you send to someone who
> has a discrete log (El Gamal/DSS) key, it will use discrete log
> algorithms.  So there is full compatibility with existing keys, while
> allowing people to move to cryptography which will be patent free
> in the U.S. after next year.

Ok. I'll take your word for it.

> A free version will be available with this functionality, with
> source code.  Existing users of PGP will hopefully find it easy
> to upgrade.
> 
> I cannot say when it will be available, other than to say that the
> functionality exists for generating and using all these kinds of keys,
> and we have four programmers, including myself, working full time on
> getting this version out.

Good news.

Raph