@bdegnan I'm not a believer of that hypothetical. I think even if it did cause some more people to favor it, there still will be more people that only took in the gossip and headlines. Between the telephone game and how difficult it is to make a correction go as viral as the original story, I think someone would be stupid to try to use something like that as a propaganda technique to promote Simon.

If anything it will mean fewer people use it.

I think. I'm no expert in that kind of thing. Neither are the mathematicians. Why would you think they'd be directing psyops?

@bdegnan Serious question: Can you tell us if the hardware you designed supported using an arbitrary number of rounds?

One idea I saw floating on the web who knows where was that if some amazing new form of cryptanalysis made AES insecure (or nearly insecure), then we could adapt to it by defining a successor to AES, where the only change might be adding extra rounds. This would allow an easier upgrade path because we wouldn't need to replace (some fraction of) existing hardware.

(Not that it's a good idea now. There is probably a cost to allow a variable number of rounds over using a fix number of fully unrolled rounds. AES getting that badly broken is beyond unlikely, but I think the comment was made when AES was much younger and we weren't certain that the number of rounds chosen would be future proof.)

@bdegnan Have you reviewed your NDA recently :-) ?

@fgrieu Can't, it's secret.

@SqueamishOssifrage I assumed that his talking points about the SIMON development were direct quotes from his NDA, were they not?

@Maeher Are you saying @bdegnan is an NSA plant, substantiating the rumors that the cabal suppressed on the meta.crypto.se question about the proliferation of botany on this site?

@SqueamishOssifrage Naturally

Is "military grade encryption" still a phrase that the youths laugh at?

@FutureSecurity yes.

Oh. Good.

They spent most of their time on homorphic encryption because it solves the power problem as you don't have to decrypt things. I was never privy to any increasing in rounds for AES, etc, but that would go against the idea of decreasing the power.