Re: [gentoo-security] Encryption Ciphers

[Florian Philipp <lists@f_philipp.fastmail.net>]

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On Thu, 2008-02-28 at 15:19 -0500, Mansour Moufid wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 1:29 PM, Florian Philipp
> <lists@f_philipp.fastmail.net> wrote:
> >  One last question for everyone who has read this rather long mail (thank
> >  you, btw): What exactly is benbi in aes-lrw-benbi:sha256 and what should
> >  I choose for XTS? The kernel description states plain but essiv and
> >  benbi work as well.
> >
> 
> benbi is an IV generation algorithm. If you look at the dm-crypt
> sources [1], benbi stands for "big-endian 'narrow block'-count" (not
> sure where they got the `i' from...). There's also one called bewbi,
> which I thought was entertaining.
> 
> Sincerely,
> Mansour Moufid
> 
> [1] http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~baker/devices/lxr/http/source/linux/drivers/md/dm-crypt.c#L110

Thanks!

So, am I right to believe that essiv is the best choice and benbi just
some kind of special requirement for lrw or should I stick with what's
recommended (although without reasons given for xts), e.g. cbc-essiv,
lrw-benbi, xts-plain?

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