If someone has gotten a jump on research and found a novel attack against their math, but the math looks good enough to convince others to use, that is an enormous advantage.
If someone has gotten a jump on research and found a novel attack against their math, but the math looks good enough to convince others to use, that is an enormous advantage.
The "unknowable secret math" argument works both ways. As I said upthread: if you believe this, how do you rule out the possibility that ARX designs are the ones NSA can't break, that they have secret math that only works against iterated ciphers built solely on bitwise primitives, and that they published this particular cipher --- something they rarely do! --- precisely to create the kind of suspicion we're seeing on the thread?
If you want to play Kremlinology instead of talking about engineering, arguments like that are fair game too. I'd rather rule both of them out.