Rjindael vs Serpent: which encryption algorithm is the best?

Post Reply New Topic

Although Rjindael won AES, some people think Serpent would've made an excellent winning choice. What is your opinion?

o.o I don't consider myself qualified for an opinion on what is best when it comes to cryptology. But for some encryption I Rjindael, Serpent, and Twofish all together through TrueCrypt. The program only allows Rjindael to be used for boot partition encryption. But crypto friends of mine said the day AES is useless as encryption, there would be more prominent targets than my computer.

As far as I've read, Rjindael won over Serpent because it was more flexible and the security was sufficient. I suppose it's an eternal debate whether performance (or whatever was the winning point) should weigh more than security. Also that kind of crypto system is supposedly limited in terms of extra encryption power through adding more bits, and will eventually have to be replaced by ... whatever those matrix ones are called.

If it was purely about security? Probably Two-fish... it has yet to be broken properly if used correctly. If I only had a choice between Rjindael and Serpent... Serpent.

If it was about speed and common implementation understood by the vast majority of people and organisations? Rjindael/AES... especially since there are now AES instructions resident on many of the latest CPU's and their are implementations available to utilise them.