do we need it all in on utility? yes please! [LWN.net]

do we need it all in on utility? yes please!

Posted Jun 2, 2006 8:56 UTC (Fri) by sitaram (guest, #5959)
In reply to: do we need it all in on utility? yes please! by coriordan
Parent article: GNU grep's new features (Linux.com)

I went to that link (10 fav software tools), and I noticed that "gpg -c" is a favourite!

I prefer "openssl enc" to "gpg -c" -- it's almost an order of magnitude faster sometimes! Here're some speed ratios from my machine:

Enc Dec Enc+Dec
Blowfish 9.39 6.95 8.2
AES256 6.09 4.05 5.08
CAST5 4.87 2.67 3.7

You may want to evaluate it yourself and consider this if you are doing this often or to large files.

why "gpg -c"

Posted Jun 2, 2006 12:40 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

I like the 'gpg -c' functionality because I think most people don't realise that GnuPG can do that. I reckon most people think that you can't only use it for public/private key encryption, and that's too complicated for some (at least as a first step).

You know what needs to be done? 'tar' needs to be given support for 'gpg -c', just like it supports gzip and bzip2 compression.

Of course password stuff isn't as secure as public key encryption, but it's great when you don't want your local proxy to keep an unencrypted copy of something, and it's good to ecrypt something and tell the password to the recipient when you meet them in person.

I haven't heard of people doing this with 'openssl enc' - I'll look into it.