On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 20:06, Mosh <[email protected]> wrote:

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_strengthening


> The salt is a random number concatenated to the password to create a
> one time key.

Everything else being equal, it makes (slightly) more sense to prefix
the salt, not to suffix it.
Obviously, this is more important with ciphers than with hashes, but
the basic point remains.


> This prevents someone from precomputing keys (dictionary),
> because the salt is a different in each file.

Ideally, the salt would change every time the file is saved.


Another trick, especially as there is no integrity control in
Vim's encryption, would be to have an ever-changing prefix
_within_ the file, perhaps even with unprintable bytecodes.

That would make the typical high-speed attacks (only decrypt
the first few bytes and go to the next key if you encounter
any non-char sequences) a lot harder. On the other hand,
this only works for files that are meant for humans and/or
that are very liberal when parsing input.


Richard

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