4 ms·
> RC4 is almost 30 years old now, and despite it being “broken” practical attacks still require enormous amounts of ciphertext and would probably not affect sec
by some_furry 12y ago
> RC4 is almost 30 years old now, and despite it being “broken” practical attacks still require enormous amounts of ciphertext and would probably not affect security in a meaningful way if you deployed it in a messaging app.
Sure, but please use ChaCha20-Poly1305 if you can. Two libraries (nacl and libsodium) implement it for you; libsodium is a portable implementation of nacl with bindings for most popular programming languages.
- tptacek 12y agoSodium/Nacl is a good recommendation. If you can use them, do. If you're not using Sodium/Nacl, don't go out of your way to use Salsa/ChaCha/Poly1305. If your platform has a good AES-GCM, that's also fine. The important thing is to use the best tested, simplest interface available to you. If switching from AES to ChaCha means you have to do any of your own protocol design, it's not a win.
- some_furry 12y ago> If you're not using Sodium/Nacl, don't go out of your way to use Salsa/ChaCha/Poly1305. Right, sorry if I implied that anyone should roll their own crypto libraries. Use the standard implementations! http://doc.libsodium.org/bindings_for_other_languages/README.html http://doc.libsodium.org/bindings_for_other_languages/README... For PHP developers: https://github.com/defuse/php-encryption https://github.com/defuse/php-encryption (wrapper for openssl)