Some Comments on the First Round AES Evaluation of RC6 1 2 1 Scott Contini , Ronald L. Rivest , M.J.B. Robshaw , 1 and Yiqun Lisa Yin 1 RSA Lab oratories, 2955 Campus Drive, San Mateo, CA 94403, USA fscontini,matt,yiqung@rsa. com 2 M.I.T. Lab oratory for Computer Science, 545 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
[email protected] 1 Intro duction The rst round of the AES pro cess is coming to an end. Since August of 1998, the cryptographic community has had the opp ortunity to consider each of the fteen prop osed AES candidates. In this note, we take the opp ortunity to answer some of the questions and to resp ond to some of the issues that have b een raised ab out the suitabilityofRC6 as an AES candidate. 2 Encryption/Decryption Performance of RC6 Since the publication of RC6 a variety of researchers and implementors have examined RC6 and considered its p erformance in a wide range of environments. 2.1 32-bit architectures RC6 is one of the fastest AES prop osals on 32-bit architectures, particularly so on the NIST reference platform of a 200 MHz Pentium Pro. It is argued by many that the most reasonable way to assess the p erformance of an algorithm is to consider its sp eed in an assembly language implementation. We agree that this is the case. However it is also interesting to consider how the p erformance of RC6 compares when using di erent compilers. It is imp ortant to note that to take advantage of compiler-sp eci c optimizations the source co de provided to the compiler might need to b e changed.