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Comment by onli | Hacker News Reader

How? Seriously interested. This is cross-plattform software. How do you change that from PBKDF2-SHA256 to Argon in a way that still lets you use your desktop PC as well as your 4 year old budget Android device? And then support user configuration on top of that? Same about raising iterations.

The submitted github comment also makes that point, this is actually hard to do.

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Offer the user the choice for other solutions with a performance penalty?

Choice is always better. for people who care\worry, they can change to something more resistant to cracking.

As someone who worked in this field. Offering "options" when a vast majority of the user base don't even understand that their data is encrypted, is often a poor approach to take.

Users will forget their Master Passwords even and because they forgot them they will believe they've been "hacked" and blame you.

Users on Hacker News and similar sites where users actually understand the underlying technology to some degree are the exception, not the norm. Adding options does not help a vast majority of the user base and it complicates your codebase further. Imagine making that change and less than 1% of your users actually use that feature?

Yes. Part of the value prop of these services is they have experts who are better qualified to make these decisions than I am.

It's a poor approach for multiple reasons. Like being the origin of downgrade attacks.

If the default is the downgrade, what have you lost if there's not upgrade path in the first place? nothing!

There's no issue with that. layman users won't modify these settings while advanced users will be warned.

You're thinking wrong.

Agreed, defaults are the norm and then the advanced settings are layered. Even so, explaining and showing the differences visually or with video is possible. I don't agree with treating people as babies when it comes to tech.

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