Comment by LinuxBender
3 years ago
I remember them saying that in a follow-on email on one of the mail list servers. That was not their original statement but I can't remember exactly what they said. I just remember it was quite smarmy and did not sit well with me coming from such an organization. Regardless Serpent won the challenge by their criteria but then they moved the goal posts after the fact.
Both Rijndael and Serpent could have equally become more performant in the AES-NI CPU instruction sets and I am also not ok with how that evolved either. Cipher fixation is a security vulnerability. AES-NI CPU instructions should have included a few ciphers for performance. Probably Rijndael, Serpent and Twofish. There are folks in the cryptography community that are very much against using more than one cipher and that makes it clear to me they have been compromised or manipulated by something.
Please cite for me the most credible cryptographic researcher you can find who advocates cascades of ciphers. I'm not certain, but if I had to bet, I'd bet that you can't even find one.
You can believe whatever you want to believe, but the threshold you've just claimed to have for believing someone is compromised suggests that essentially every academic cryptographic researcher in the world is compromised.