----- Forwarded message from Jeffrey Walton <noloader@gmail.com> ----- Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2013 20:27:47 -0400 From: Jeffrey Walton <noloader@gmail.com> To: Cryptography List <cryptography@randombit.net> Subject: [cryptography] Compositing Ciphers? Reply-To: noloader@gmail.com Hi All, With all the talk of the NSA poisoning NIST, would it be wise to composite ciphers? (NY Times, Guardian, Dr. Green's blog, et seq). I've been thinking about running a fast inner stream cipher (Salsa20 without a MAC) and wrapping it in AES with an authenticated encryption mode (or CBC mode with {HMAC|CMAC}). I'm aware of, for example, NSA's Fishbowl running IPSec at the network layer (the "outer" encryption") and then SRTP and the application level (the "inner" encryption). But I'd like to focus on hardening one cipherstream at one level, and not cross OSI boundaries. I'm also aware of the NSA's lightweight block ciphers (http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/404). I may have been born at night, but it was not last night.... Has anyone studied the configuration and security properties of a inner stream cipher with an outer block cipher? Jeff _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5