Silent Circle Moving Away From NIST Ciphers in Wake of NSA Revelations | Threatpost
mercredi 2 octobre 2013 à 10:37 Neuromancien, le 01/10/2013 à 08:15
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CAFAI, le 02/10/2013 à 10:37
“At Silent Circle, we’ve been deciding what to do about the whole grand issue of whether the NSA has been subverting security. Despite all the fun that blogging about this has been, actions speak louder than words. Phil [Zimmermann], Mike [Janke], and I have discussed this and we feel we must do something. That something is that in the relatively near future, we will implement a non-NIST cipher suite,” Callas wrote in a blog post explaining the decision.
Twofish is a cipher suite written by Bruce Schneier and it was one of the finalists during the AES competition, but lost out to the Rijndael algorithm. It has been resistant to cryptanalysis thus far, and Callas said it also has the advantage of being an easy replacement for AES in Silent Circle’s products. The company also will be replacing SHA-2, an older NIST hash function, with Skein, which was a finalists in the recently completed SHA-3 competition.
“We are going to replace our use of the AES cipher with the Twofish cipher, as it is a drop-in replacement. We are going to replace our use of the SHA–2 hash functions with the Skein hash function. We are also examining using the Threefish cipher where that makes sense. (Full disclosure: I’m a co-author of Skein and Threefish.) Threefish is the heart of Skein, and is a tweakable, wide-block cipher. There are a lot of cool things you can do with it, but that requires some rethinking of protocols,” Callas said.
(Permalink)
(Permalink)
CAFAI, le 02/10/2013 à 10:37
“At Silent Circle, we’ve been deciding what to do about the whole grand issue of whether the NSA has been subverting security. Despite all the fun that blogging about this has been, actions speak louder than words. Phil [Zimmermann], Mike [Janke], and I have discussed this and we feel we must do something. That something is that in the relatively near future, we will implement a non-NIST cipher suite,” Callas wrote in a blog post explaining the decision.
Twofish is a cipher suite written by Bruce Schneier and it was one of the finalists during the AES competition, but lost out to the Rijndael algorithm. It has been resistant to cryptanalysis thus far, and Callas said it also has the advantage of being an easy replacement for AES in Silent Circle’s products. The company also will be replacing SHA-2, an older NIST hash function, with Skein, which was a finalists in the recently completed SHA-3 competition.
“We are going to replace our use of the AES cipher with the Twofish cipher, as it is a drop-in replacement. We are going to replace our use of the SHA–2 hash functions with the Skein hash function. We are also examining using the Threefish cipher where that makes sense. (Full disclosure: I’m a co-author of Skein and Threefish.) Threefish is the heart of Skein, and is a tweakable, wide-block cipher. There are a lot of cool things you can do with it, but that requires some rethinking of protocols,” Callas said.
(Permalink)