Re: Strongest encryption algorithm

1) In you opinion what is the strongest encyption algorythm avaiable
today.
OTP is theoretically secure (probability of breaking an OTP collapse
into the probability of guessing the message) so I think it may be
called the strongest, however is less practical to use than modern
ciphers and doesn't give any protection against message corruption, so
is suitable only to meet privacy and not autenticity.
Otherwise, strongest and whidely usable algorithms for secret key
encryption are the best AES finalists: Rjindael, Twofish and Serpent,
whith 256 bit keys are secure for conceiveable future span and with 128
bit block size are suitable to cypher any reasonable amount of data.
Moreover exists some modes of use for those algorithms with provable
security that gives also cryptographically strong authentication (the
message is not corrupted and is from the sender you expect), see
authenticated encryption for more info.

2) In your opinion what do you thing are crutially important
features/properties of a top of the line encription algorythm?
To be secure... the hard thing is to prove it! So, an algorithm with
clean mathematical properties (like Rijndael) is a good one because
it's easier to study and prove or disprove security characteristics.
The algorithm should be fast otherwise either the user will not use
them or you should rely on something other to provide security and any
other thing introduced in the system could be unsecure, so there are
more things to test (i.e. public key algorithms are not fast, so
security systems employing them must also rely on secret key algorithms
to encrypt the actual data).
The algorithm should be usable otherwise it will be employed only in
narrow fields, i.e. the OTP is the most secure possible algorithm, but
key management is too hard to make it a viable solution for most uses.

However, security of the algorithm is only one of the factors in
security, often it is the strongest link while other things (password
strength, random number generation and randomness sampling for keys and
nonces generation, phisical security etc) are often understimated by
the whide public.

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