[Cryptography] Speculation about Baton Block Cipher

[ianG]

On 13/08/2015 07:37 am, Ryan Carboni wrote:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BATON
>
> I think in modern terms, according to the above wikipedia page:
>
> BATON is a family of authenticated encryption ciphers, with a variable
> block width, and accepts a tweak as an input?


I'm not sure how you get that it is has a variable blockwidth from the 
wikipedia page?

But yes, I see the hint about the checksum:

"160 bits of the key are checksum material."

> To think that since 1995 the NSA has a cipher that the civilian
> cryptographic community is on the verge of accepting!
>
> And this is before the AES competition as well!
>
> It's only been 20 years anyway.


Yeah, interesting point.  Although it's not really a "cipher" in the old 
terms, it's more a cipher suite, and maybe the composition just got lost 
in the bureaucracy of creating the standard?



iang