Re:NIST may not have you in mind
by tptacek on Sunday October 21, 2012 @01:20PM
(#4680143)
That's more untrue that true. Most popular applications of AES could just as easily use CTR instead of CBC (I'm not particularly interested in litigating the conversion of applications that use ECB); many of those applications even have an option to do that. Most settings in which AES-CTR is acceptable admit to any other stream cipher.
Even most message-based crypto --- applications where the designers can predict the size of most encrypted messages --- are well served by CTR, or by a native stream cipher.
So, while there are fundamental differences between Salsa20 and AES, for bulk encryption purposes those differences come nowhere close to the difference between GCC and Windows 8. It's really more of a "GCC vs. LLVM" kind of difference.
Even most message-based crypto --- applications where the designers can predict the size of most encrypted messages --- are well served by CTR, or by a native stream cipher.
So, while there are fundamental differences between Salsa20 and AES, for bulk encryption purposes those differences come nowhere close to the difference between GCC and Windows 8. It's really more of a "GCC vs. LLVM" kind of difference.