[openssl-dev] Speck Cipher Integration with OpenSSL

[Hanno Böck]

On Fri, 5 Jan 2018 10:52:01 -0800
William Bathurst <wbathurs at gmail.com> wrote:

> 1) Community interest in such a lightweight cipher.

I think there's a shifting view that "more is not always good" in
crypto. OpenSSL has added features in the past "just because" and it
was often a bad decision.

Therefore I'd generally oppose adding ciphers without a clear usecase,
as increased code complexity has a cost.
So I think questions that should be answered:
What's the usecase for speck in OpenSSL? Are there plans to use it in
TLS? If yes why? By whom? What advantages does it have over existing
ciphers? (Yeah, it's "lightweight", but that's a pretty vague thing.)


Also just for completeness, as some may not be aware: There are some
concerns about Speck due to its origin (aka the NSA). I don't think
that is a reason to dismiss a cipher right away, what I'd find more
concerning is that from what I observed there hasn't been a lot of
research about speck.

-- 
Hanno Böck
https://hboeck.de/

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