[openssl-dev] Speck Cipher Integration with OpenSSL

[William Bathurst]

Hi dkg,

You stated the following:

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.

Simon and Speck has been in the public domain for a number of years and 
there are quite a few white papers and articles on the Ciphers. Allowing 
public scrutiny and crypto-analysis is one way to put a cipher through 
the grinder to make sure there are no back doors or weaknesses.

Regards,
Bill


On 1/5/2018 11:33 AM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> 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