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2

XTS is designed so that the plaintext and ciphertext sizes are the same. This is "needed" for disk encryption in order to preserve the sector size. However, when you are encrypting your disk at the file level, this is a completely irrelevant issue. Also, XTS is not "ideal" in the sense that it's not truly a wide block cipher (defined as a pseudorandom ...

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Use XTS for whole-disk encryption. It is designed for that purpose. Definition of XTS mode in wiki is under the Disk Encryption Theory which says enough i think :) In GCM, for a fixed key each, IV value must be distinct. This makes it disadvantageous for encryption of large files. From an early GCM question: GCM is bounded to encrypting about 68 GB ...

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Is it safe to generate IV along with KEY from PBKDF2 when using and storing salt for each user or should IV also be randomly generated and stored along with salt? When generating IV from PBKDF2 I'm basically choosing for it to be part of the key, ie a secret. Using a sufficiently large salt per user would guarantee that no two generated KEY/IV pairs ...

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Under the ideal cipher model, security is not diminished by any choice of value $H = E_K(d)$ for a known value $d$, as long as none of the counter values that get encrypted to generate the encryption stream is equal to $d$. This is what "ideal cipher" means: you have no information on $E_K(x)$ for any $x$ that you have not already tried to encrypt with the ...

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