Defaults

Robert J. Hansen rjh at sixdemonbag.org
Tue Mar 17 22:33:48 CET 2015


> I remember reading about an attack that works better against AES-256 
> than AES-128:

That one's a related-key attack, which requires the attacker to have a
significant number of keys that have some mathematical relationship to
each other.

OpenPGP uses random nonces for symmetric keys (or iterated hashing,
which does a pretty good job of destroying mathematical relationships),
so this attack is a complete nonissue for OpenPGP.  :)

> I am not qualified to argue for or against either cipher, but I
> wonder if this advice from 2009 is still valid today.

The biggest reason, IMO, to move to 256-bit ciphers is because it will
hopefully quell the voices who are screaming that 128-bit crypto is
somehow insufficient.  It's not, and no one has ever presented any
serious evidence that it is, but these arguments crop up with great
regularity nevertheless.

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