Reconsidering Speck
Reconsidering Speck
The Speck cipher is geared toward good performance in software, which makes it attractive for smaller, often embedded, systems with underpowered CPUs that lack hardware crypto acceleration. But it also comes from the US National Security Agency (NSA), which worries lots of people outside the US—and, in truth, a fair number of US citizens as well. The NSA has earned a reputation for promulgating various types of cryptographic algorithms with dubious properties. While the technical arguments against Speck, which is a fairly simple and straightforward algorithm with little room for backdoors, have not been all that compelling, the political arguments are potent—to the point where it is being dropped by the main proponent for including it in the kernel.