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[TLS] chacha to replace RC4 (was: Salsa vs. ChaCha)

Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos <nmav@redhat.com> Fri, 06 December 2013 12:20 UTC

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From: Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos <nmav@redhat.com>
To: Samuel Neves <sneves@dei.uc.pt>
Date: Fri, 06 Dec 2013 13:19:48 +0100
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Cc: tls@ietf.org
Subject: [TLS] chacha to replace RC4 (was: Salsa vs. ChaCha)
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On Thu, 2013-11-28 at 04:30 +0000, Samuel Neves wrote:
>  - Zooko has mentioned BLAKE and its success against cryptanalysis, but
> as noted this does not translate to a useful security reduction. It is
> worth pointing out, however, that cryptographers chose to base the core
> of their algorithm in the ChaCha quarter-round rather than the Salsa
> quarter-round. This suggests equal or more confidence in ChaCha (see
> also [4]).

To speed things up, we have submitted an alternative draft that replaces
RC4 with Chacha [0] instead of Salsa20. This draft is based on the 20
round variant of chacha.

We believe there are merits in selecting a winner of cryptographic
competition, but given your comments and that Chacha was the
recommendation of the CFRG there is no need to delay things if Chacha vs
Salsa20 is only issue to replace RC4.

[0]. http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-mavrogiannopoulos-chacha-tls-00.txt

regards,
Nikos

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