Photo by Vlado Paunovic on Unsplash Introduction Whether you've worked with cryptography and encryption tools or not, you've probably heard of AES. The Advanced Encryption Standard was announced by NIST in 2001, and is one of the most widely used cryptographic algorithms for symmetric encryption. AES has long been the cipher of choice for securing web traffic, including TLS, VPNs, email, messaging apps, and more. However there is a challenger to the dominance of AES — ChaCha20. Daniel Bernstein ...