The symmetric ciphers

[Robert J. Hansen]

On 9/10/2013 6:35 AM, Philipp Klaus Krause wrote:
> I wonder if it would be a good idea to have an option to combine 
> symmetric ciphers, e.g. users could state a preference list like
> this:

No.  This idea gets floated every few years and the answers never
change.  It's not a good idea.  If you look in the list archives you can
find some pretty long, detailed writeups on why.

> Assuming it takes effort a to break cipher A and effort b to break
> cipher b, this should result in effort at least max(a, b) needed to
> break A+B.

Basically, though, it's "this is a naive and unfounded assumption."