<story><title>Speeding up and strengthening HTTPS connections for Chrome on Android</title><url>http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/04/speeding-up-and-strengthening-https.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>This is great news.&lt;p&gt;ChaCha20 is a refinement of Salsa20, which is probably Bernstein&amp;#x27;s best-known crypto design (it survived the eSTREAM contest to become one of the final portfolio ciphers). Bernstein wrote an extremely readable design paper on Salsa20:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://cr.yp.to/snuffle/salsafamily-20071225.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;cr.yp.to&amp;#x2F;snuffle&amp;#x2F;salsafamily-20071225.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Salsa20 is essentially a fast hash function run in a carefully designed counter mode. If you don&amp;#x27;t care about speed, you can turn any secure hash function into a stream cipher by, for instance, running the HMAC of that hash in counter mode. Here, Bernstein has designed the Formula 1 car of hash cores to run quickly in software without side channels as the basis for a counter-mode stream cipher.&lt;p&gt;Poly1305 is, like the GHASH construction from GCM, a &amp;quot;polynomial MAC&amp;quot;, which is the modern way to say &amp;quot;cryptographic CRC&amp;quot;. Poly1305 was designed more carefully for software performance than GHASH. In particular, because it&amp;#x27;s based on binary fields, for competitive performance GHASH requires either hardware support (such as the Intel CLMUL instructions) or a table-based implementation that potentially leaks secrets from cache timing. Poly1305 is based on prime fields and is fast in software on platforms without instructions tailored to it. It is also mercifully easier to code (though maybe I&amp;#x27;m just irrationally biased against binary field polynomial math).</text></comment>
<story><title>Speeding up and strengthening HTTPS connections for Chrome on Android</title><url>http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/04/speeding-up-and-strengthening-https.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>agl</author><text>Details: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/02/27/tlssymmetriccrypto.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.imperialviolet.org&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;02&amp;#x2F;27&amp;#x2F;tlssymmetriccrypto...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>