this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
267 points (97.8% liked)
Linux
48310 readers
645 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
AES has been accelerated on all Intel CPUs since Broadwell, was common as far back as Sandy Bridge, and has been available since Westmere.
AMD has had AES acceleration since Bulldozer.
But the commenter is right that adding a second layer of encryption is useless in everything except very specific circumstances.
Yes, but as I've found recently AES-NI is only as good as your software support for it. Had a team using an ancient version of winscp and they kept complaining about download speeds on our 10Gb circuit. Couldn't replicate it on any other machine with the newest version of winscp so I installed their exact version. AES-NI support wasn't added until like 2020 and it gave them 5x better download speed after upgrading.
I've also found about this recently when moving my root from drive to drive which was after I upgraded to 13th gen intel (from various older i5s) and the best cipher changed (
cryptsetup benchmark
).agreed that it is useless for most cases but I could see it being useful if you need multiple people to agree on decrypting a file.
For that, you would use Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm rather than multiple encryption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_secret_sharing
that's another way, I guess.... if you want to split the file, that is
No, you don't split the file. You split the master decryption key.
Each user just needs to remember their own password, and SSS can reconstruct the master key when enough users enter their passwords.
That's pretty nitty although you can always just partition a long key and distribute the partitions to the different people
there's always more than one way to skin a rat
What circumstances would that be? I can't see the use case doe this, but I'm open to see how and when that would be needed.
There's a Wikipedia article on multiple encryption that talks about this, but the arguments are not that compelling to me.
The main thing is mostly about protecting your data from flawed implementations. Like, AES has not been broken theoretically, but a particular implementation may be broken. By stacking implementations from multiple vendors, you reduce the chance of being exposed by a vulnerability in one of them.
That's way overkill for most businesses. That's like nation state level paranoia.