I'm configuring scripts etc. to use GPG's symmetric mode to encrypt some files on my home desktop system.
When I want to edit one of the encrypted files I decrypt it and pipe it into my editor and then, to save it, the editor writes the file to a named pipe and the following encrypts it:-
echo $pwd | gpg --symmetric --passphrase-fd 0 epipe
The named pipe, epipe, is then deleted.
This works fine as long as there is no MDC integrity checking but if I use --force-mdc or use a cipher which defaults to doing MDC then the above command hangs. I think this must be because gpg is trying to read the MDC string from epipe as well as the file data and the read blocks.
If I want to use AES256 does turning off MDC integrity checking actually make things any less secure? These are files used only by me, never exchanged with others.