Re: technical review of the Slipjack algorithm -- comments from an anonymous source and very well taken (especially last paragraph)

[David Farber <farber@central.cis.upenn.edu>]

>>> Walt Tubman, IBM (retired)

Are you sure that this is not Tuchman, IBMer who pushed LUCIFER into
becoming DES and did a lot of the interfacing to Washington to get it
through.  Horst Feistel was father of LUCIFER but I understand that he
did not have it fully detailed, notably he did not have the innards of
the S boxes defined although he did describe their transfer
functionality.

>>> Dave Mayer, AT&T

I assume this is the Mayer of Matyas and Mayer, the Wiley book on
Crypto?

Please note that all of these people are, at best, cryptographers.  And
there is some question about that I suspect.  Tuchman is a system
designer; is that not also true of Kent?

But whatever they are and no matter how good they are as
cryptographers and system integrators of cryptographic algorithms and
protocols, the bottom line is: are any of them cryptanalysts?  It
takes a cryptanalyst to think dirty and understand where inherent
weaknesses of an algorithm might be, and what attacks against it might
work.

                                        Unsigned