Post #4239940

@cryptomancer @CryptoOrrDun@ioc.exchange Yes, 7 rounds, and no, it doesn't scale even to 10 rounds, let alone 14. Attacking weakened versions of ciphers is a standard analytic technique—and sometimes a variant of the attack on a weakened version will scale up and sometimes it won't. (A fair number of years ago, there was a decent attack on a weakened version of Skipjack, an NSA-designed cipher. I showed that to someone I knew who had NSA contacts. His reply: "You call it worrisome; I call it good engineering." To my knowledge, no one has ever been able to scale it up to the full cipher.)