[$] Reconsidering Speck

The Speck cipheris geared toward good performance in software, which makes it attractivefor smaller, often embedded, systems with underpowered CPUs that lackhardware crypto acceleration. But it alsocomes from the US National Security Agency (NSA), which worries lots ofpeople outside the US-and, in truth, a fair number of US citizens as well.The NSA has earned a reputation for promulgating various types ofcryptographic algorithms with dubious properties. While the technicalarguments against Speck, which is a fairly simple and straightforwardalgorithm with little room for backdoors, have not been all thatcompelling, the political arguments are potent-to the point where it isbeing dropped by the mainproponent for including it in the kernel.