I don’t know anything about how the NSA interacted with ISO, but it is worth mentioning that the NSA has material explaining these ciphers: * https://csrc.nist

I don’t know anything about how the NSA interacted with ISO, but it is worth mentioning that the NSA has material explaining these ciphers: * https://csrc.nist.gov/csrc/media/events/lightweight-cryptography-workshop-2015/documents/papers/session1-shors-paper.pdf https://csrc.nist.gov/csrc/media/events/lightweight-cryptogr... * https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/560.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/560.pdf * https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2016/10/18/wingers-presentation-lwc2016.pdf https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2016/10/1... Those include statements about how far cryptanalysis have weakened the ciphers, which the NSA claims was roughly what they had expected during design. If the NSA published its own cryptanalysis, would you believe it, or would you assume they had told less than the whole story? What if they paid an academic to publish cryptanalysis (“of course he would say that, he was paid $X by the NSA!”)? The NSA appears to be in a catch-22 here.