GnuPG 4096 bit limit

cryptography gnupg
Arlen picture Arlen · May 16, 2011 · Viewed 8.4k times · Source

Why is RSA keys in GnuPG limited to 4096 bits?

Would it be illegal for me to modify the source to increase the max size?

ssh-keygen does not have this limitation (e.g., I can create a key that's 32768 bits long). Why is that?

Answer

przemoc picture przemoc · May 16, 2011

There is pretty sensible explanation (for similar question) by Fire Ant at Security Forums:

http://www.security-forums.com/viewtopic.php?p=317962#317962

All rights reserved there, but fair use citation of short excerpt shouldn't be inappropriate methinks:

Key sizes over 4096 are not currently supported in GPG. The reason for this is that 8192 keys are very slow. If you require a key greater than 4096-bit then you should really thing about what you are using that key for?

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