Hacker News Reader

Do you happen to know if CrashPlan's encryption is any better?

AFAIK AES in CBC-mode is a no-no because it betrays which blocks of data are identical, and that's what BlackBlaze uses.

View on HN

That is not the case. That would be ECB mode. CBC stands for cipher-block-chaining. Where you xor the plaintext with the ciphertext of the last block before encryption specifically to prevent identical blocks from yielding identical ciphertext.

There are some issues with CBC regarding the fact that it can't really be parralelized. It also lacks authentication as opposed to the newer GCM mode.

In general though, AES-256 CBC is essentially THE standard best practice proven form of encryption.

Oh, thanks for the info, I mixed those up.

Without inspecting the system, hard to say for sure, but on paper it's much better. https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Configuring/Security_...

I really liked the fact that I could set my own key too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com