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https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/5118/is-aes-256-weaker-than-192-and-128-bit-versions
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/another_new_aes.html
Speed and its security impact Cryptographic performance problems have frequently caused users to reduce their cryptographic security levels or to turn off cryptography entirely.The security impact of a new cryptographic library
The remaining risk is that users find NaCl too slow and turn it off, replacing it with low-security cryptographic software or no cryptography at all. NaCl avoids this type of disaster by providing exceptionally high speeds.
We have prioritized security over compatibility, and as a consequence have also prioritized speed over compatibility
Concretely, think about a demo showing that spending a billion dollars on quantum computation can break a thousand X25519 keys. Yikes! We should be aiming for much higher security than that! We don't even want a billion-dollar attack to be able to break one key! Users who care about the security of their data will be happy that we deployed post-quantum cryptography. But are the users going to say "Let's turn off X25519 and make each session a million dollars cheaper to attack"? I'm skeptical. I think users will need to see much cheaper attacks before agreeing that X25519 has negligible security value.https://blog.cr.yp.to/20240102-hybrid.html
Speed drives adoption, Daniel J. Bernstein (djb) probably understand this more than anyone else. And this is what led Adam Langley to decide to either stay on SHA-2 or move to BLAKE2. Is that a good advice? Should we all follow his steps?https://cryptologie.net/posts/maybe-you-shouldnt-skip-sha-3/
The choice of key size is a tradeoff between the risk of key compromise and performance.http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-81r1/sp-800-81r1.pdf
* Are “special” primes dangerous?
- Are “random” primes dangerous?
- Are primes required to be 3 mod 4?https://cr.yp.to/papers/safecurves-20240809.pdf
These questions go far beyond 128 vs 256 vs 512 bits of security.
Footnotes
[edit]- ↑
- Daniel J. Bernstein (Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA)
- Tanja Lange (Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Netherlands)
- Peter Schwabe (Research Center for Information Technology Innovation and Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan)
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