Re: Binary packet protocol rethink (was: Re: ChaCha20-Poly1305 for SSH)

[Damien Miller <djm%mindrot.org@localhost>]

While we're dropping wishlist items for SSH v.3, here's one of mine:

Key exchange negotiates an AEAD rather than a cipher and a MAC
separately, and does so from a greatly trimmed set of options. E.g.
AES-GCM, chacha20+poly1305 and an AES-CTR+HMAC mode.

IMO the AEAD primitive is the right metaphor for the security properties
of the SSH transport protocol. Removing the large cartesian product of
ciphers x MACs will make testing faster and binaries smaller too.

-d