The use of Twofish, Threefish, Serpent and Skein would be very welcome.
Silent circle are moving away from AES...
https://threatpost.com/silent-circle-moving-away-from-nist-ciphers-in-wake-of-nsa-revelations/102452
Twofish is a cipher suite written by Bruce Schneier and it was one of the finalists during the AES competition, but lost out to the Rijndael algorithm. It has been resistant to cryptanalysis thus far, and Callas said it also has the advantage of being an easy replacement for AES in Silent Circle’s products. The company also will be replacing SHA-2, an older NIST hash function, with Skein, which was a finalists in the recently completed SHA-3 competition.
“We are going to replace our use of the AES cipher with the Twofish cipher, as it is a drop-in replacement. We are going to replace our use of the SHA–2 hash functions with the Skein hash function. We are also examining using the Threefish cipher where that makes sense. (Full disclosure: I’m a co-author of Skein and Threefish.) Threefish is the heart of Skein, and is a tweakable, wide-block cipher. There are a lot of cool things you can do with it, but that requires some rethinking of protocols,” Callas said.
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Schneier wrote a journal paper 13 years ago raising safety concerns about AES.
Schneiers min safety factor is 2. A broken cipher has a safety factor of 1.
His article states (from memory)....
Broken cipher = 1
AES 128 = 1.11 (too low a safety factor, but fast)
AES 256 = 1.56 (fast, but not acheiving 2)
Twofish = 2.56
Serpent = 3.56 (designed for hardware, so slow in software).
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Journal is here:
https://www.schneier.com/paper-twofish-final.html
The Twofish Team's Final Comments on AES Selection
B. Schneier, J. Kelsey, D. Whiting, D. Wagner, C. Hall, N. Ferguson, T. Kohno, M. Stay
May 15, 2000
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We have to accept that the NSA has a dual function - to carry out drag net surveillance AND to rate safety of encryption. There is a conflict between these 2 objectives.
It may mean that more public support for Schneiers encryption and hashing algorithm, will appear, as an insurance policy against the dual nature of the NSA.
I would be very interested to see the addition of Twofish, Serpent and Skein into OpenVPN.
