[Cryptography] Predictions regarding Simon and Speck for 2019

[Zenaan Harkness]

Reconsidering Speck (subscribers only for another few days):
https://lwn.net/Articles/761992/


Above article discusses why Speck was added and relatively soon,
removed, from Linux.

The NSA has burned some serious bridges and enough ISO guys know
enough crypto to be able to decisively tear the NSA a new one in the
following example 'So, just to let you know what's been going on at
our end ...' email to the LKML (also linked in the comments to the
above article) :
https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-crypto/msg33291.html

which email concludes with some (thankfully) common sense:

  Which bring us to the million dollar question:
  > So, what do you propose replacing it with?
  Nothing. I am usually not one to argue for maintaining the status
  quo and I sure am in favor of encryption-for-all but this case is
  the text book example for employing the Precautionary Principle.
  You yourself are not fully convinced that Speck is secure and does
  not contain any backdoors. If it was really secure, it could have
  been used in all cases and not only on low-end devices where AES is
  too slow. AES is slower than Speck on most platforms.
  …
  I would also like to point out that including an algorithm because
  "it's better than nothing" result in something that is not
  better-than-nothing, but stands in the way of good solutions. Since
  there is no acute problem, why do we need to solve it? This is from
  the cryptographers' point of view. From the end-user point of view
  when they get something bundled into Android, they don't know that
  it was included there as something that is "better than nothing".
  They think of it as "good enough; endorsed by
  Android/Google/Linux". What you give them is a false sense of
  security because they don't know of all the question marks
  surrounding Speck (both technical and political).

True dat.



-----------
On Mon, Jun 19, 2017 at 06:20:30PM +0000, Salz, Rich via cryptography wrote:
> It has recently come to my attention that "Notes on the design and analysis of Simon and Speck" was published.
> 
> You might also find this useful, lots of links:
>    https://github.com/iadgov/simon-speck
> 
> which BTW is part of https://nationalsecurityagency.github.io/
> 
> _______________________________________________
> The cryptography mailing list
> cryptography at metzdowd.com
> http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography


From: Ryan Carboni <ryacko at gmail.com>
To: cypherpunks at lists.cpunks.org, Crypto <cryptography at metzdowd.com>
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2017 10:49:26 -0700
Subject: Predictions regarding Simon and Speck for 2019

It has recently come to my attention that "Notes on the design and
analysis
of Simon and Speck" ( https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/560.pdf ) was
published.
Thus I have decided to encrypt a message using this page (
https://web.archive.org/web/20161211164439/http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/tea-block.html
) with a key generated by keypass pattern "H(15)" (15 lowercase
hexadecimal). I plan on releasing the key in the early part of 2019


Block XXTEA is not trivially bruteforced with no "cribs" so here's my
predictions for 2019: