[gentoo-user] Luks: Which cipher to use

[Marco]

Hi all,

I am about to encrypt my external hard drive. I found the howtos
http://de.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/DM-Crypt and
http://de.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/DM-Crypt/Daten-Partition_verschl%C3%BCsseln
(sorry, German...). They give a good understanding of how to do the
stuff, but I am unsure about which cipher to use. LRW is considered
insecure in some cases so thus it should be replaced by XTS which is
experimental though... Furthermore, if using XTS is used, there is
different options like xts-plain, xts-benbi, xts-essiv:sha256. Which
option is preferable? What about the key size? Is there any relation
between key size and block size of the file system in terms of data
security?

Thanks for your tips and suggestions!

--
Regards,
 Marco