Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos nmav@gnutls.org writes:
Do you think that using salsa20r12 is better?
Yes.
Estream doesn't really compare with AES because estream selected 5 ciphers as winners instead of one so it cannot be given simply the estream name (estream was the stream cipher competition, ecrypt was the organizer).
The authorative reference on estream ciphers seems to be http://www.ecrypt.eu.org/stream/finallist.html.
I note that it uses the name "Salsa20/12", and that the original "final" list includes "Salsa20", which I think means the original 20-round variant. And from reading http://www.ecrypt.eu.org/stream/portfolio_revision1.pdf, it seems possible that a future revision of the list might tweak the recommended number of rounds again.
we view the portfolio as being a snap-shot of a fast-moving field. All the designs in the eSTREAM portfolio are relatively immature and it is possible that more analysis will change the picture dramatically. With this in mind, we intend to maintain the eSTREAM web-pages for the foreseeable future and to update the portfolio as circumstances dictate.
So the list is volatile, which makes the "estream" name unsuitable for algorithm identifiers.
That's why I prefer the name estream-salsa20 (and also because we used the same name in the proposal for Salsa20 http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-josefsson-salsa20-tls-02 )
I'd recommend making the substitition "ESTREAM_SALSA20" -> "SALSA20R12" there too.
Regards, /Niels