> That's not the case with SPECK and SIMON. They're mainstream designs, and, more importantly, if you can hide a backdoor in a simple ARX Feistel block cipher that can be implemented in 100 lines of code, we probably have bigger concerns than these algorithms.
Isn't the bigger concern that the NSA may be proposing these because they already know how to break them, and not necessarily that they'll sneak back doors into implementations?
I'm not really distinguishing between NSA knowing how to break a conventional block cipher and NSA having snuck a backdoor into it. To me, the implications are basically the same either way, as is my rebuttal.
Isn't the bigger concern that the NSA may be proposing these because they already know how to break them, and not necessarily that they'll sneak back doors into implementations?