The Case for Serpent

Serpent should be chosen because it is the most secure of the AES finalists. Not only does it have ample safety margin, but its simple structure enables us to be sure that none of the currently known attacks will work. It is also simple to check that an implementation is correct. Although Serpent is not as fast as the other finalists on the 200 MHz Pentium machine used for round 1 benchmarking, this disadvantage largely disappears when we consider the likely platforms and applications of the 21st century. In hardware, for example, Serpent has easily the best performance, while on IA64 it’s second.