Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2 posts.
Encrypting data: Use AES in CTR (Counter) mode, and append an HMAC . AES is about as standard as you can get, and has done a good job of resisting cryptologic attacks over the past decade. Using CTR mode avoids the weakness of ECB mode, the complex (and bug-prone) process of padding and unpadding of partial blocks (or…
First things first: Why use a composition of encryption and MAC instead of a single primitive which achieves both? Because people are very good at writing bad code. In my experience on the FreeBSD security team, writing dozens of security advisories, there are three types of code which are especially prone to have…
