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AEGIS or AES?

2 min readJun 1, 2025

AES has been around since 2001, and it is still going strong. But, there are alternatives, including with ChaCha20 and AEGIS, and where the mighty Bart Preneel co-authored a paper on AEGIS [here][1]:

The paper is [here][1]:

Overall, AEGIS-128L and AEGIS-256 are AES-based cyphers which integrate an authentication tag, and where each message can have a unique identifier. The nonce value is also relatively large, with a 128-bit nonce for AEGIS-128L and a 256-bit nonce for AEGIS-256, and has a better security margin than AES-GCM. Overall, we can leak the state of the cipher process, but that will not leak the key, and has been shown to have a fast operation with AES-enhanced processors, and with a lower memory requirement than AES-GCM.

libsodium.js is a sodium crypto library that is compiled to WASM (WebAssembly) and uses the same sodium methods as the Python port. Overall, libsodium uses either AEGIS-128l, AEGIS-256 or XChaCha20. With this…

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Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE
Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE

Written by Prof Bill Buchanan OBE FRSE

Professor of Cryptography. Serial innovator. Believer in fairness, justice & freedom. Based in Edinburgh. Old World Breaker. New World Creator. Building trust.

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