Distrustful U.S. allies force spy agency to back down in encryption fight
SIMON and SPECK are both pretty straightforward block cipher designs. You can implement them in less than 100 lines of code. There are no s-boxes or weird constants. Unlike a lot of what NSA designs, they were published formally, with design papers that included rationales. The software-optimized cipher (SPECK) is a simple ARX design. The hardware-optimized cipher (SIMON) uses bitwise operations instead of AND. This is pretty mainstream stuff. It is very unlikely that they harbor backdoors.(The point of both algorithms is to provide scalable low-profile crypto, instantiable at very small key and block sizes; this is something you'd want if you were, for instance, building an encrypted IOT scheme on microcontrollers).That doesn't mean they should be international standards; maybe it makes sense that after Dual EC, the NSA doesn't have a shot at producing a global standard for low-profile encryption. But however well justified, it's mostly a political decision, not a technical one.