AES Algorithm Coming Soon

Anonymous Coward writes: "The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will announce the winner of the Advanced Encryption Standard competition on Oct. 2 at 11:00 am (Eastern Standard Time). This algorithm is going to be the new government standard, so it's worth checking the page out. Following the announcement a report on the AES development efforts will be released on the NIST AES webpage. The NIST Advanced Encryption Standard page can be found at http://www.nist.gov/aes."

Comments

Re:Twofish

[Admiral Burrito]

Twofish seems a nice system.

It is. That would be my second choice, after Rijndael.

From what I've read, Twofish doesn't stand up do differential power analysis as well as Rijndael does, and is not quite as smartcard-friendly. Rijndael may also work better on future parallel computers. Rijndael is slightly smaller, faster, etc, etc. AFAICS Rijndael slightly edges out Twofish in nearly every category.

Twofish is American though, which may make a difference.

Serpent would be my third choice, but it's too slow compared to the others. Mars is too complex. RC6 is too dependant on rotations.

Its good that it is completely open, so there can be no patenting problems.

I can't remember the details, but whoever wins is not allowed to milk it even if they have patents. It's one of the stipulations for all AES candidates (but it only applies to the one that wins).

Of course, it's possible they might select more than one algorithm...

AES in OpenPGP

[XNormal]

An algorithm ID is already defined for AES in OpenPGP (RFC2440).

It might be nice publicity stunt to release a special version of GnuPG (1.0.4?) with AES support within seconds of the official announcement.

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Re:Twofish

[Mike Connell]

> That's not exactly an unbiased source.

It's completely irrelevant how biased they are - I wasn't referencing their work as a groundless opinion. I was reference their paper "The Twofish Team's Final Comments on AES Selection" submitted in the round 2 comments stage which you should read. This isn't a question of the Blowfish team saying "la la la - Rijndael sucks", it's a case of them doing the analysis and showing why they think it has problems and publishing the results and the reasoning.

I agree that with modifications Rijndael can be made more secure. In fact, why not just scrap all the entries and say "let's start all over again with more secure versions"? it could go on forever. I think NIST should be choosing the most secure algorithms *entered*, and that isn't Rijndal.

my 0.02,
Mike.