Categories
Cryptography

Cryptographic Wear-Out for Symmetric Encryption

As we look upon the sunset of a remarkably tiresome year, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about cryptographic wear-out. What is cryptographic wear-out? It’s the threshold when you’ve used the same key to encrypt so much data that you should probably switch to a new key before you encrypt any more. Otherwise, […]

Categories
Cryptography

Comparison of Symmetric Encryption Methods

There seems to be a lot of interest among software developers in the various cryptographic building blocks (block ciphers, hash functions, etc.), and more specifically how they stack up against each other. Today, we’re going to look at how some symmetric encryption methods stack up against each other. If you’re just looking for a short […]

Categories
Cryptography

Why AES-GCM Sucks

If you’re reading this wondering if you should stop using AES-GCM in some standard protocol (TLS 1.3), the short answer is “No, you’re fine”. I specialize in secure implementations of cryptography, and my years of experience in this field have led me to dislike AES-GCM. This post is about why I dislike AES-GCM’s design, not […]