[3228] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Julian Assange: AES: US Announces Crypto Candidates
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perry E. Metzger)
Sun Aug 23 17:52:46 1998
To: cryptography@c2.net
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1998 21:10:32 -0400
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Date: 22 Aug 1998 00:39:39 -0000
From: Julian Assange <proff@iq.org>
To: aes@suburbia.net
Subject: AES: US Announces Crypto Candidates
US Announces Crypto Candidates by Michael Stutz
4:00am 21.Aug.98.PDT
Fifteen ciphers were unveiled at a government-sponsored conference
Thursday as candidates for the United States' encryption standard for
the 21st century.
The First Advanced Encryption Standard Candidate Conference, a
three-day event in Ventura, California, that ends Saturday, is
sponsored by the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST).
The selection process next enters an initial evaluation period, ending
15 April 1999, a time in which the cryptographic research community is
invited to test the security and speed of the ciphers, or algorithms,
for encoding information. It is hoped that the initial evaluation will
reduce the number of candidates to five or fewer. The finalists will
be named by the end of summer 1999.
Eventually, the winning cipher will be adopted as the Advanced
Encryption Standard (AES), a lengthy process that is not likely to be
completed until 2001.
The US government currently uses and recommends the Data Encryption
Standard (DES) to encrypt and decrypt nonclassified documents. The
cipher was considered secure when it was adopted by NIST in 1977 as a
Federal Information Processing Standard for use by federal agencies to
encrypt sensitive information. But the amount of computing power that
is readily available today has made DES obsolete as a secure cipher.
Like DES, the AES will be free for anyone to use without a
license. The competition to build the new cipher is fierce. Aside from
the marketing benefits that will accrue to the AES design winner,
cryptographers are a competitive bunch, and are wont to argue the
virtues of one algorithm, or security design, over another.
Scientists and researchers from 12 different countries contributed the
ciphers: CAST-256 by Entrust Technologies; Crypton by Future Systems
Inc.; DEAL by Richard Outerbridge and Lars Knudsen; DFC by Centre
National pour la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); E2 by Nippon Telegraph
and Telephone Corp.; FROG by TecApro Internacional S.A.; HPC (Hasty
Pudding Cipher) by Rich Schroeppel; LOKI97 by Lawrie Brown, Josef
Pieprzyk and Jennifer Seberry; Magenta by Deutsche Telekom AG; MARS by
IBM Corp.; RC6 by RSA Laboratories; Rijndael by Joan Daemen and
Vincent Rijmen; SAFER+ by Cylink Corp.; Serpent by Ross Anderson, Eli
Biham, and Lars Knudsen; and Twofish by Bruce Schneier, John Kelsey,
Doug Whiting, David Wagner, Chris Hall, and Niels Ferguson.
