AES vs. ChaCha20: The Elegance of Simplicity in Cryptography

This article explores two widely used symmetric encryption algorithms: AES and ChaCha20. While AES is powerful, its complex structure makes it vulnerable to cache-timing attacks and slower without hardware acceleration. In contrast, ChaCha20 uses simpler ARX operations, resulting in faster speeds, higher security, and consistent performance across various architectures, avoiding cache-timing attacks. The article concludes that simpler designs often lead to greater security, efficiency, and understandability, with ChaCha20 being a prime example of this principle.