[Cryptography-dev] Low level API for Symmetric Encryption

[Paul Kehrer]

That's an interesting angle. Obviously block cipher modes are
applicable outside the realm of AES, but most crypto toolkits have
used the cipher-key_len-mode convention when specifying ciphers (e.g.
OpenSSL's EVP_aes_256_gcm). Is it worth trying to upend that
convention?

On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 5:32 PM, Jean-Paul Calderone
<jean-paul at hybridcluster.com> wrote:
> On 08/07/2013 06:16 PM, Donald Stufft wrote:
>> So to kick things off I'd like to get AES-GCM exposed and figured it could be a good way to start the ball rolling for figuring out how we want to expose symmetric ciphers at the low level API.
>>
>> I'm thinking cryptography.primitives.aes which has classes named like AES128GCM, AES256CBC, etc. The obvious naming scheme being AlgorithmKeysizeMode.
>>
>>
>
> GCM (CBC, etc) is a mode of operation that is applicable to arbitrary
> block ciphers.
>
> Why should it be tied to "AES128"?  Why wouldn't you GCM(AES128())?  If
> you're talking about primitives, AES128 is more primitive than GCM on
> AES128.  And GCM isn't specific to AES, so I don't see
> cryptography.primitives.aes as the proper home for it.
>
> I hope these aren't questions with highly obvious answers.
>
> Jean-Paul
>
>
>
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