Renew/augment strong crypto algorithms

[khaosis]

With 7.3, vim introduced blowfish as strong crypto option (:X). I guess Bram has added Blowfish since it's relatively small and the algorithm is available cut'n'paste-style.

However, Bruce Schneier recommended to stop using Blowfish for various reasons already in 2007 [1], so adding support for other strong algorithms would make Neovim a lot more secure, if crypto is needed. Twofish, Threefish and AES seem interesting.

Note: This ticket only refers to symmetric crypto.

[1] https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/46254/bruce_almighty_schneier_preaches_security_linux_faithful/

[tarruda]

@khaosis I would prefer if these things were eventually extracted out of the core and implemented as plugins.

[ashleyh]

👍 to remove from core

[tssm]

Keep it simple :D

[khaosis]

Although I agree with you that extracting much of non-integral vim parts to plugins is a good thing, having a built-in rock-solid crypto routine - regardless of what plugins are available - makes sense to me. Crypto is getting more and more important from my PoV, and being able to encrypt every file you read or edit with vim on-the-fly seems a highly interesting feature to me. It's not much of a code overhead anyway. Anyone else?

[gilligan]

I don't think that any crypto features should be part of (neo)vim. We are talking about an all purpose editor.

Especially for crypto I would not rely on encryption features provided by some editor. They might just be copy pasted from somewhere. Leave the right job to the right tool.

[justinmk]

For anyone interested, the emacs-devel mailing list recently had a long discussion arguing for/against inclusion of crypto (libnettle) in emacs: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-02/msg00058.html

The conclusion was basically that FFI to external binaries like GnuPG is acceptable and probably preferrable.

implemented as plugins.

@tarruda Vim encryption also encrypts Vim's swap files, so I wonder if plugins will be able to control something like that.

[justinmk]

@khaosis In the thread I linked above, it is pointed out that encryption in an editor may not be a good idea because it cannot benefit from security updates to a standard system utility such as GnuPG.

However, shipping neovim with support for calling out to OS encryption facilities may be valuable. I actually am a longtime user of Vim's blowfish support myself.

[tarruda]

@justinmk we can work to add this capabilities to plugin.

In any case vim currently has a blowfish implementation and that is fine for now