From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: fb57f,9d00a7db22818139 X-Google-Attributes: gidfb57f,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,9d00a7db22818139 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-02-26 17:04:03 PST Path: supernews.google.com!sn-xit-03!supernews.com!freenix!skynet.be!newshub1.nl.home.com!news.nl.home.com!news-feed.nld.sonera.net!news.soneraplaza.nl!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3A9AFBB9.D658B146@multiweb.nl> From: Thomas Boschloo Organization: Cypherpunk X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (Win95; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,sci.crypt Subject: Re: Arcfour in Ada References: <983158039.27320.0.nnrp-08.9e98cc46@news.demon.co.uk> <3A9ADBAE.EFF0B8AC@multiweb.nl> <983229612.3178.0.nnrp-10.9e98cc46@news.demon.co.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2001 01:58:33 +0100 NNTP-Posting-Host: 212.127.192.132 X-Complaints-To: abuse@sonera.nl X-Trace: news.soneraplaza.nl 983235786 212.127.192.132 (Tue, 27 Feb 2001 02:03:06 MET) NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2001 02:03:06 MET Xref: supernews.google.com comp.lang.ada:5552 sci.crypt:19046 Date: 2001-02-27T01:58:33+01:00 List-Id: Julian Morrison wrote: > > "Thomas Boschloo" wrote: > > > Why did you decide to go for arcfour and not the AES > > http://www.nist.gov/aes ? > > [...] > > > > AES seems so much more secure in the long run than RC4! > > AFAIK, the AES cypher is more secure in that you can safely reuse keys. > It's also newer, though, and new crypto is less trustable. AES is also a > very gread deal more CPU churn and overhead than Arcfour. Since you can > only encrypt in blocks of four bytes, you need extraneous header info to > show where the contents end, and you need to CBC the blocks together. If > you're encrypting a lot of small things (such as in Fling's routeballs) > the overheads will add up. That makes sense. I believe you could perhaps use an escape character to identify the end of a string. Like (and I have to dig deep into my memory now) when you send a bit string, you could say that '000' marks the end of your bit string. If you need to actualy send '000' you pad it like '0010' or something like that. I am a bit rusty, have to look it up in my old study books. A better example might be the way printf and scanf work in C. '/' is the escape character (like '/n', '/0', etc.) and if you actually want to send a '/' you just send a '//'. It need not take up a lot of bandwidth/space I think. But I don't know much about implementing TCP. I do know that the freedom network stopped using fixed sized packages in version 2.1 or something, because it took up too much bandwidth. I seem to remember that they also use UDP for something but I am confusing myself now. The good thing about UDP is that you don't have to set up a connection to send data. It doesn't have to point back to you (which is good if you want to be anonymous). Well, who do I think I am :-) I'm sure you already know all you need to know and more ;-) Regards & Good luck, Thomas -- Jessica "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way"