Re: thinking about AES, VIA and the bad guys

[Greg Thomas <getbsd@dslextreme.com>]

On May 1, 2004, at 6:48 PM, rembrandt wrote:

> I think a littlebit about AES, the AES-Engine of the VIA CPUs and the
> bad bad boys.
>
> I can still remember that someone told me that openBSD use AES but I
> can't remember clearly for what (swap oder crypto-hdd with svnd).
>
> Let's think about a littlebit:
> What will happen if someone buy not only 1 "VIA-C3-Motherboard"?
> He buys 20 oder 50..
> And what will happen if he rewrite 'john' a littlebit to play with oBSD
> and the AES-Engine?
>
> I think that's a realistic "worst case".
> So what's about Twofish? Twofish is faster as Blowfish and also 
> useable for
> swap/crypto-userland and even the login or ipSEC.
>
> http://www.schneier.com/twofish-performance.html
>
>
> Am I too paranoid

Yes.

>  or is such a attach against AES realistic? :-/

Maybe.

> I hope there some guys out there with much more know how about 
> cryptography.
>
> And think also about the guys from the nsa (and other) too.
> Such organisations could buy tousends of the VIA-Boards and let them 
> run in a cluster.

Why would such organizations buy them when they could hijack hundreds 
of thousands of PCs for free?

Greg