Ciphers: AES-256-GCM VS CHACHA20-POLY1305

JonathanLee

Hello fellow Netgate community members can you please help?

What cipher is the better choice for security? What cipher is better for speed and flexibility?

AES-256-GCM vs CHACHA20-POLY1305

I want to say AES-256-GCM is more secure, and is not as vulnerable to attacks.

And CHACHA20 has massive speed advantages.

What are your thoughts?

kprovost

@JonathanLee AES-256-GCM is the faster cipher.

As for security, you'd have to ask a cryptographer, but in practical terms there is no difference in security. You're at vastly higher risk for basically any other type of security problem than you are at risk of having your cryptography broken.

Gertjan

@JonathanLee

Chacha might be a bit simpler to crypt/decrypt, thus faster then AES-GCM, if straight forward procedural language is used.
But if there is hardware support for :

then don't even bother : AES-GCM will win hands down.

JonathanLee

@Gertjan does SafeXcel accelerate any of these ?