this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
15 points (89.5% liked)
Privacy
31876 readers
565 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
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
The main benefit is that all the ciphers need to be broken to compromise the data. So as long as each of the ciphers are strong, you'll get a little better security.
The main downside is additional computational complexity. Most disk encryption systems have minimal performance impact because the CPU has hardware acceleration for popular ciphers, so it can keep up with disk reads. Both of my computers use full disk encryption, and the system runs plenty fast. If you run multiple ciphers, you're more likely to notice the decryption process.
The likelihood of any strong cipher being broken is incredibly low, and it's much more likely that an attacker will compromise the data while it's unencrypted than attacking the cipher directly, in which case the cascading cipher won't help.
If you want paranoid levels of security, consider following the NSA's Rule of Two, which means two completely independent layers of encryption. Don't use two ciphers from the same vendor, but two vendors. For example, use full disk encryption through the OS, and an encryption application for important files. If you use two ciphers from the same vendor (i.e. your application with cascading ciphers), it's more likely that they would share a vulnerability than if they came from different vendors.
Ah, good idea using multiple vendors, thank you