[Cryptography] Simon, Speck and ISO

Peter Gutmann pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz
Fri Oct 24 12:27:38 EDT 2014


dj at deadhat.com writes:

>Today the NSA proposed that Simon and Speck be added the the ISO JTC1/SC27
>approved ciphers spec.

Does anyone know what this is?  It isn't the current incarnation of ISO 9979
is it?  That was created in the early 1990s when the ISO decided, all by
itself, without any external pressure applied at all, not to standardise any
crypto algorithms.  The register was created as a compromise where the ISO
appeared to do something but didn't really do anything, it's just a number-
allocation method and nothing more.  It's also been, after an initial burst of
registrations for algorithms like DES, IDEA, and RC2/4, a graveyard of
algorithms that no-one cares about (FWZ1, SPEAM1, CIPHERUNICORN, Triplo,
FSAngo), if you have something that you can't get standardised anywhere then
you dump it into 9979 (and possibly now the ISO JTC1/SC27 registry).

Peter.


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