OpenSSH Has a New Cipher — Chacha20-poly1305 — from D.J. Bernstein

First time accepted submitter ConstantineM writes "Inspired by a recent Google initiative to adopt ChaCha20 and Poly1305 for TLS, OpenSSH developer Damien Miller has added a similar protocol to ssh, chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com, which is based on D. J. Bernstein algorithms that are specifically optimised to provide the highest security at the lowest computational cost, and not require any special hardware at doing so. Some further details are in his blog, and at undeadly. The source code of the protocol is remarkably simple — less than 100 lines of code!"

Comments

Re:100 lines is meaningless

[hawguy]

The referenced source file has no actual implementation of the encryption in it, so claiming 100 lines is a bit silly...

Using their metric of excluding the function calls that do the real work, OpenSSL only needs one line of source code to encrypt a file:

#!/bin/bash

openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -salt -in somefile.txt -out somefile.txt.enc