| Bill Jonas on Wed, 17 Apr 2002 23:10:23 +0200 |
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On Wed, Apr 17, 2002 at 04:42:04PM -0400, kevin mudrick wrote: > Hmm. Wouldn't it be possible to encrypt all the mails to the list > recipients, one at a time, add them to a queue, and then send them out? When you specify more than one key to encrypt to, the plaintext doesn't get encrypted over and over for each recipient. The way PGP/GPG works is the plaintext first gets encrypted with a strong symmetric cipher, then the key for that cipher is encrypted with the recipient's public key using public-key encryption methods. This is to save computation times; public-key cryptography is very slow compared to symmetric-key cryptography. So if you have multiple recipients, the symmetric key simply gets encrypted to multiple recipients. If you were to set the server up as you were suggesting, it would take much longer, since the plaintext would have to be encrypted over and over again... -- Bill Jonas * bill@billjonas.com * http://www.billjonas.com/ "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin Attachment:
pgpVbjtrN6Lu8.pgp
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