Subject: [RFC PATCH 3/9] crypto: chacha20-generic - refactor to allow varying number of rounds

From: [email-masked] (Eric Biggers)
Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2018 14:51:21 -0700

On Tue, Aug 07, 2018 at 11:21:04AM +0100, Samuel Neves wrote:
> > The best attack on ChaCha breaks 7 rounds, and that attack requires 2^248 operations.
> 
> This number, as far as I can tell, comes from the "New features of
> Latin dances" paper. There have been some minor improvements in the
> intervening 10 years, e.g., [1, 2, 3, 4], which pull back the
> complexity of breaking ChaCha7 down to 2^235. In any case, every
> attack so far appears to hit a wall at 8 rounds, with 12 rounds---the
> recommended eSTREAM round number for Salsa20---seeming to offer a
> reasonable security margin, still somewhat better than that of the
> AES.
> 
> Best regards,
> Samuel Neves
> 
> [1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/698
> [2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/217
> [3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1034
> [4] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dam.2017.04.034

Thanks Samuel, I'll fix that number in the next iteration of the patchset.

- Eric