I generated today a new DSA/Elgamal key for my father.
The interesting result was 3072/1024 DSA/Elgamal compared to the usual 1024/4096 as of before with KDE 4.7.2
Now, this might be an error of the packages in KS48 repos (in this case a bugreport is needed) or this can be another way of doing the notation or this is actually another cryptographic approach.
DSA for long time was limited for GPG compatibility to DSA 1024 keys and these where “hardwired” to SHA1 (which was considered broken - although more theoretically AFAIK). Now a DSA3072 will be probably another SHA key lenght and therefore Elgamal is held lower (1024) for an overall key-lenght of 4096.
That should be than equally safe, if not safer then the previous DSA/Elgamal settings. Alternative would be the MIT RSA keys with 4096 but I see on my machines the very difference of reckoning power since these ones are really very long. And well, DSA in that setting may be even more difficult to crack (always theoretically).
Can somebody delight me with some source of info about this change, or some link where the decision was discussed. Not that a man cannot “Google” as sharp minded people and friends of the un-useful redundancy are not tired to repeat in those cases. But I would like to have a bit less hardship in searching if by chance somebody already knows.
Thanks in advance
P.S. The feature request (as of signature) has reached quota 56. Good prospects. Keep on for a better safety.