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A comment on GnuPG 2.2.23. Parent comment

Re:GnuPG 2.2.23 by upofadown on Friday September 04, 2020 @12:52PM (#24376643)
Age has authenticated encryption so it is slightly more convenient for stuff like encrypting backups that you think might undergo some sort of known plain text attack. To prevent that with gpg you have to also sign the backup.

This recent security thing makes it seem that GPG has also gained authenticated encryption. Dunno how I feel about that. OpenPGP stuff gets its security and reliability from simplicity. Adding stuff takes away from that. This security thing kind of supports that.

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Re:GnuPG 2.2.23 by dependenttypes on Friday September 04, 2020 @01:22PM (#24376936)
GPG adds something that they call MDC, which is kinda similar to a mac in authenticated encryption schemes. It is enabled by default.
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Re:GnuPG 2.2.23 by XMPPwocky on Friday September 04, 2020 @01:42PM (#24377147)
The MDC scheme exists- it's also sketchy as all hell. Wouldn't trust it if serious adversaries are a reasonable threat for you.

https://github.com/gpg/gnupg/blob/master/g10/mainproc.c

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Re:GnuPG 2.2.23 by upofadown on Friday September 04, 2020 @04:25PM (#24378556)
Yeah, MDC was added as something better than nothing for unsigned messages/files. It has ended up being remarkably robust over the years, considering. The biggest deal is that you can entirely remove it. As a result stuff these days tends to consider a missing MDC as an invalid MDC.
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