On 15.09.15 12:17, mwnx wrote: > Not sure what kinds of metrics you're talking about.
Thank you, the Wikipedia reference is enough to gain an idea of blowfish's current security. In the first paragraph: "Blowfish provides a good encryption rate in software and no effective cryptanalysis of it has been found to date." That said, with cm=blowfish, Vim does now (7.4.688) say: Warning: Using a weak encryption method; see :help 'cm' Enter encryption key: Changing to cm=blowfish2 has fixed that, catching up with developments sufficiently for my use case, I think. (I have one 5 kB encrypted file, i.e. so much less than 4 GB, that there isn't enough text on which to do much useful cryptanalysis.) > Also, blowfish seems to no longer be a very recommended cipher. From > wikipedia: > > Blowfish is known to be susceptible to attacks on reflectively weak > keys.[8] [9] This means Blowfish users must carefully select keys as > there is a class of keys known to be weak, or switch to more modern > alternatives like the Advanced Encryption Standard, Salsa20, or > Blowfish's more modern successors Twofish and Threefish. Bruce Schneier, > Blowfish's creator, is quoted in 2007 as saying "At this point, though, > I'm amazed it's still being used. If people ask, I recommend Twofish > instead."[10] The FAQ for GnuPG (which features Blowfish as one of its > algorithms) recommends that Blowfish should not be used to encrypt files > that are larger than 4 Gb because of its small 64-bit block size.[11] Skimming through reference [9], I figure that 5 kB of encrypted text is far too little meat for even the improved attack to be of any use, so even the older blowfish would still be a hard nut to crack. > Not to mention the fact that –as far as I've surmised– vim decided to create > its own implementation of blowfish instead of using one that has already had > time to undergo public scrutiny, such as GPG's implementation. The algorithm implementation published on Wikipedia shows it to be a trivial coding exercise. I'm delighted to have that fully integrated in Vim, so there's nothing outside, that I have to muck with. > All in all, I just don't see why I should trust using the blowfish algorithm > to encrypt sensitive information at this stage when there are much better > alternatives out there which are readily available. And I especially can't > trust any kind of in-house implementation of it. For large files, it is theoretically weak, and superseded. But Twofish covers that. ... > For more information on vimcrypt's capabilities, all the documentation is in > doc/vimcrypt.txt > (https://github.com/mwnx/vimcrypt/blob/master/doc/vimcrypt.txt). The long keys look good. Thank you. You've improved my security, even without moving across ... yet. Erik -- -- You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "vim_use" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
