Why Serpent cipher not included in OpenPGP

Discussion in 'privacy technology' started by rpk2006, Sep 1, 2016.

  1. rpk2006

    rpk2006 Registered Member

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    I tried to find why Serpent is excluded from the list of ciphers in OpenPGP and therefore not included in GPG as well.

    Does any one know why this good cipher is not included?
     
  2. oliverjia

    oliverjia Registered Member

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    One can only guess. Serpent is the safest cipher of the 3 finalists: Serpent, AES and Twofish. Main "drawback" of Serpent is its relatively slower performance as compared to AES and Twofish. So it's really a performance vs Safety balance.
     
  3. haakon

    haakon Guest

    True. Serpent came in second with Twofish third.

    AES won out because it was proved easier to imbed in hardware which was the primary need for the kind of network systems running the huge server farms and for the massive traffic they handle.

    Most of the premium Intel procs have AES imbeded. Not sure about AMD.

    On my 3rd gen i7 system, it take a few seconds to encrypt a 10 GB m2ts video with AES and with Serpent (in software, of course) about 45 seconds.

    Anyhow, as far as PGP goes, there's nothing wrong with Twofish.

    But to answer your question as to why it's not included... I don't know. :doubt:
     
  4. Amanda

    Amanda Registered Member

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    It's actually Serpent, then Twofish, then AES. IIRC AES is half as secure as Twofish, though it's much faster and that's why it got first place.

    I can only imagine what "Threefish" will be like ;)
     
  5. Amanda

    Amanda Registered Member

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    You mean AES-hardware-acceleration? My FX 6300 has it. I remember seeing 14 GB/s in VeraCrypt's benchmark, or in AIDA64 AES benchmark. I don't really remember. Not that it matters too, because my HD has a read rate of only 60 MB/s hehehehe, so if I used Serpent/AES/Twofish in cascade it wouldn't matter much.

    Problem is, Twofish is not optimized. Even Bruce Schneider, one of the creators of Twofish, says that using AES makes more sense nowadays.
     
  6. haakon

    haakon Guest

    Yeah. The last AMD system I built was an Athlon XP. I knew AMD would embed AES in some of their product, but I couldn't say for sure not having looked into their products for a long time.

    Without digging up the details, I recall AES crossed the finish line first, then Serpent and Twofish. But in terms of power, your order is correct. Like in motorsports, the most horsepower don't always make the winner.

    Here's an interesting benchmark of AES vs Twofish in an i5 system running Windows 10 x64. Source: see the URL in the screenshot.

    AESvsTwofish.jpg
     
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