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I assume this is something put up by Dan Bernstein, since that's his domain.

Please, can someone explain what this is about? E.g. Dan mentions the inventors of Rijndael, which is AES. What is his complaint about it?

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The major complaint against AES is that it is very difficult to implement in a data-independent way without hardware support. Bernstein has done some research on this (http://cr.yp.to/antiforgery/cachetiming-20050414.pdf), and a major theme of his research has been designing systems that are friendly to implementers.

I have no idea if that is what this specific dig ("they already master the art of snake oil") pertains to.

I'm not qualified to answer that question, but I was curious too, did some googling and found another resource. This is still not very satisfying, but there is a little more information on the Reddit thread about this competition:

https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/1us6a1/snake_oil_cr...?

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