Re:GOST cryptography – Russian Federation’s cryptographic al...
by tptacek on Friday October 21, 2016 @09:04PM
(#12766343)
There are basically three kinds of ciphers:
* The kind, named "AES", that are implemented in hardware on a bunch of different mainstream platforms.
* Ciphers that were designed to be fast on general-purpose CPUs (for instance: that have good multipliers) and are thus cycles/byte competitive. Salsa/Chacha is the best-known example here, and currently only one with widespread use (this used to be the bucket RC4 was in).
* Ciphers that nobody uses unless a government mandates it.
There might be a case for having two bulk cipher specs, one for hardware acceleration and one for software. That's how eSTREAM did it.
There's really not much of a case for standardizing, or really even adopting, other ciphers.
Things are different in signature-land, or key-agreement-land, or even hash-land. They're definitely different in AEAD-land. But for bulk encryption primitives, we may be at a happy place already.
* The kind, named "AES", that are implemented in hardware on a bunch of different mainstream platforms.
* Ciphers that were designed to be fast on general-purpose CPUs (for instance: that have good multipliers) and are thus cycles/byte competitive. Salsa/Chacha is the best-known example here, and currently only one with widespread use (this used to be the bucket RC4 was in).
* Ciphers that nobody uses unless a government mandates it.
There might be a case for having two bulk cipher specs, one for hardware acceleration and one for software. That's how eSTREAM did it.
There's really not much of a case for standardizing, or really even adopting, other ciphers.
Things are different in signature-land, or key-agreement-land, or even hash-land. They're definitely different in AEAD-land. But for bulk encryption primitives, we may be at a happy place already.