VeraCrypt — And Memories of Classic Ciphers (Twofish, Serpent and Camellia)

I like VeraCrypt. With this, we don’t have all that messy encryption of a volume, and where we can encrypt into a file, and then mount the file as a volume. One thing I like about VeraCrypt is that it takes me back to some of the classic methods in cryptography:

In 2000/2001, NIST ran a competition on the next generation symmetric key method, and Rijndael won (and which was created by its Belgian creators: Vincent Rijmen and Joan Daemen). But in second place was Serpent, and which was created by Ross Anderson (RIP), Eli Biham and Lars Knudsen [here].

And, it’s great to see the classic Bruce Schneier method of Twofish in there too. Bruce mainly writes books and lectures these days, but at one time, he created symmetric key encryption methods. The most famous of these is the Blowfish method, and which was published in 1993. Like DES and 3DES, it uses a 64-bit block size (8 bytes), but unlike DES, it is unpatented [1]: