Preferred block cipher

[Robert J. Hansen]

On 09/15/2013 03:26 PM, Mike Acker wrote:
> I selected TWOFISH as first as that was developed by Bruce Schneier

Although Schneier is definitely one of the authors, he has in the past
expressed a desire to see the other people of his research team
credited.  Twofish was designed by Schneier, John Kelsey, Doug Whiting,
David Wagner, Chris Hall and Niels Ferguson, all of whom are big names
in the development of cryptographic algorithms.

> and then not accepted by NIST -- and Bruce offers the source code.

Although Schneier offers *an* implementation of Twofish, there is not a
single canonical source representation.  Twofish is an algorithm and
there are many ways it can be implemented.

Similarly, GnuPG only uses publicly-available algorithms.

> as far as the others go I just pushed the commercial ones toward the
> back:

There are no proprietary algorithms in GnuPG.