[openssl-dev] Speck Cipher Integration with OpenSSL

Daniel Kahn Gillmor dkg at fifthhorseman.net
Fri Jan 5 19:33:59 UTC 2018


Hi Bill--

On Fri 2018-01-05 10:52:01 -0800, William Bathurst wrote:

> We have open sourced our work in regards to integrating the Speck Cipher 
> with OpenSSL. Basic information about this cipher can be found here.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speck_(cipher) 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speck_%28cipher%29>
>
> SPECK is a lightweight block ciphers each of which comes in a variety of 
> widths and key sizes and is targeted towards resource constrained 
> devices and environments. This implementation is currently implemented 
> using the 128 and 256 block sizes.

Thanks for your work on this, and for reporting on it here.  Out of
curiosity, who is the "We" involved here?  The changeset history
appears to be a bit ambivalent about the authorship, based on edits to
the README itself:

  https://github.com/m2mi/openssl_speck/commit/4a67a5644ff5c56956063d858033585f57686d1e
  https://github.com/m2mi/openssl_speck/commit/8d619beffa3bd1c221fc6a7946b9aa7a00774019

> 1) Community interest in such a lightweight cipher.

I'm not convinced that the OpenSSL project should encourage the adoption
of SPECK, given the general level of distrust around the algorithm:

  https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/09/iso_rejects_nsa.html

My understanding is that the algorithm designers and primary advocates
have not been particularly forthcoming with their design goals, and
their reputation is mixed, at best.

Regards,

      --dkg
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