in reference to https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2011-November/002999.html

We're doing a development effort and/or thought experiment in the Tahoe-LAFS project. This development effort and/or thought experiment is called "One Hundred Year Cryptography" [1].

The main result of the experiment so far is that you don't need to worry very much future-proofing your digital signatures, collision-resistant hashes, or MACs, but you *should* worry about future-proofing your Diffie-Hellmans and ciphers!

Once you deploy a future version of Tor which no longer accepts old-style signatures, then it will no longer matter to your users if someone subsequently figures out how to forge old-style signatures (for example by using quantum computers). On the other hand, once you deploy a future version of Tor that uses a newer cipher, your users remain vulnerable to an attacker who later breaks the older cipher and reads their older plaintexts.

Combining two ciphers as you suggested by XORing their output (and keying them independently—perhaps by deriving two subkeys from a master key using a strong KDF) seems to be a safe and efficient way to protect against this sort of threat and doesn't seem to impose too high of a burden of complexity. That's what we intend to do in Tahoe-LAFS. A Google Summer of Code student, Yu Xue, contributed some code to generate subkeys and XOR the streams, but we haven't yet integrated it into Tahoe-LAFS itself. (I intend to do that in the release cycle that just opened up, so within the next 4 or so months.)

I haven't thought very much about future-proofing Diffie-Hellman operations. That sounds like it might be more complex. I *have* thought about how to combine two different digital signatures or public key encryption algorithms. Those don't seem too dauntingly complex, but like I said not so urgent.

I'm leaning toward combining AES-256 with XSalsa20. Other interesting options include ChaCha (used in SHA-3 finalist Blake, and very similar to Salsa20) and Threefish (used in SHA-3 finalist Skein).

Regards,

Zooko

[1] https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/OneHundredYearCryptography