"Hardware Performance Simulations of ..." is an exercise in irrelevance.
NSA (hi, guys, tough stuff these remailer chains ?) wants us to
believe that if a cypher is 2x faster in someone's implementation
than some other cipher's implementation on the same process, then
that is a criteria for selection. Or that it matters in any way.
No shit.
And now time will be spent on these evaluations, and presented in
color slides, with bar graphs and pie charts, right ? While crypto
celebrities chant in the background.
ROT-13 is not in the contest, is it ?
First, encryption is one of the most computation-intensive tasks in
mass use (so meterological models and similar do not count). More cycles
per bit processed usually means that brute forcing the cypher is harder.
Burning cycles is a part of being a cipher (not sufficient, of course.)
Second, what we really want to know is what NSA knows about candidates
that we will find out in 20 years (that's what happened with DES.)
And third, are Feistel nets doomed (cryptanalyzed) ? Looking at the history
of crypto, it's about the time for the major paradigm shift. Unselfish help
in creating AES by the agency whose sole purpose is to read traffic is a
clear sign that something is ROTten. Would you buy a radar detector from
highway patrol ?
