[upofadown]

There are no preferences available for symmetrical encryption. GnuPG for example does AES for symmetrical encryption by default. Is it violating RFC-4880? I think things get philosophical here.

I doubt that there is an implementation left that does 3DES by default.

It would be nice to update the standard to make AES required to be available for decryption. I really wish that the most recent standard update attempt had restricted their scope to such uncontroversial changes before going to war over the controversial changes.

[woodruffw]

That’s still incongruous with your original argument: using AES for long term encryption isn’t (particularly) controversial, but using it via a scheme that only mandates 3DES absolutely is. The default is immaterial in the setting being discussed, since for compatibility you don’t get to control how the data was originally encrypted.

Edit: I say “particularly” because I don’t think any cryptographer would endorse 4880’s only mode of operation for AES.