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I've never heard of such technique, what does onioning do?


I don't think there is an exact term (and if there is I'm all ears), so the closest one I found pertains to onion routing[1], except instead of each layer being a different key, each layer is a different algorithm and a different key. I.E if you wanted to use algorithm X and algorithm Y, you could encrypt your plaintext with cyphertext_x = X(x_key,plaintext), and then cyphertext = Y(y_key,cyphertext_x). If X is terrible, Y still protects your data. if Y is terrible, X still protects your data. Note that the order in which X and Y are applied doesn't matter.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_routing


Algorithms composition? (similar to function compositions[1], since algorithms are just function that take an input and return an output.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_composition


Use of new encryption algorithm on the ciphertext encrypted by the old algorithm.


Sounds good for symmetric crypto, but not for public key exchanges, which is what quantum compute attacks are so far all about.

There could be double-tree PKI, where nodes in the tree are represented by two key pairs in different kinds of key spaces, with the different signatures terminating in two ephemeral key pairs, which are then used for key derivation, and the subsequent secret perhaps concatenated and boosted into a higher key space? The complexity would be mind boggling. And, weaknesses in one half of the tree could translate into a security reduction on the final symmetric key, so it would have to be way over powered to be effective.

Not a simple problem to solve.


Why wouldn't that work? Exchange all n keys with their respective methods in parallel?




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