Interview With AES Author

Dave Wreski writes "I recently had a chance to ask Vincent Rijmen a few questions about Rijndael, the algorithm soon to replace DES. He talks about the development of the algorithm, his thoughts on the future of Internet security, Linux and security, and more. He's a pretty interesting guy, and had some interesting comments. You can find the interview here"

Comments

Re:Serpent

[henley]

Serpent is actually more secure than Rijndael, even if slightly slower. I personally use serpent in my loopback fs's, and it works really well!

Which nicely summarises why Rijndael won.

The competition was a nice, real-world example of a trade-off between absolute theoretical security and implementation. AES is intended to scale from smartcards to NSA supercomputers.

If AES had been about producing the most secure algorithm, period, then I guess the winner would have been one which included an infinite number of permutations... After all, if it takes an eternity to encrypt you can guarantee that it can't be broken after encryptions :-)

Note that you, too have found that what the US Gov' says doesn't necessarily apply to the real world either. However, your faith in Serpent is perhaps misguided. It may have received a similar level of analysis as Rijndael up to now, but you can guarantee that as an also-ran, it's not going to continue to receive this level of investigation. All of which leaves you more, not less, vulnerable in the longer term....

Re:Interesting approach

[divec]

Also, Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman *did* invent RSA. I'm not sure what you're implying.

Well, it was apparently thought of earlier, in the late 1960s, by James Ellis and Clifford Cocks (who were British secret agents). However they did not publish (being secret agents). R,S+A thought it up independently 10 years later, and they were the first to publish. See this techweb story for some more details.

Re:Interesting approach

[konstant]

That is true of all the candidates. Even MARS and RSA patents would have to be more-or-less unenforced if selected - go to the AES page and check out the huge red text that says exactly this.

AES homepage

Also, Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman *did* invent RSA. I'm not sure what you're implying.

-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!

Still a TwoFish Fan

[tmu]

I'll admit it: I'm still a twofish fan. I look at the number of rounds required to make rijndael reasonably secure and compare that to twofish and i don't feel happy. This is not to say that I don't think that Rijndael is secure now--it clearly is. This is also not to say that I think there's some good way to reliably determine the likely future security of uncracked algorithms--I think there is not. Nevertheless, we can guess about future security based on things like complexity (where twofish scores poorly) and number of rounds required for security (where twofish scores extremely well and rijndael does not).

There were two lurking decision factors in the AES that concern me:

1) patents. it has not been made clear how much the hitachi claimed patent affected the outcome.

2) embedded devices. i believe that the decision was weighted in favor of current embedded memory and computational power, which doesn't make any sense. Embedded applications will be more powerful by the time anyone actually implements this stuff and I'd much rather have something that is excellent on real computers and fine on smart cards, but that doesn't seem to be what we've ended up with.

Anyway, I'm glad to see the process was open and all kvetching aside, Rijndael is a *huge* improvement over DES or even DESX or tripleDES. The authors of all algorithms deserve congratulations.

Re:Encryption Overload

[ssimpson]

Over time AES will be incorporated into all security products and will become a defacto standard. We can already see that GnuPG includes full support and NAI/PGP is expected to follow shortly.

It's nothing that end users will have learn / know - it'll just be included as the standard. If someone wanted to send you an encrypted mail today then they'd still use PGP (or similar), you can't just take Rijndael and encrypt an e-mail (or web session, or SSH session or whatever).

secure standard

[gnudutch]

The only reason they won't crack it is probably because it's impossible to pronounce.

Interesting approach

[Wizard of OS]

I read an article about RijnDael in a Dutch magazine a few weeks ago. They interviewed the authors (they're from Belgium and speak Dutch too) about the algorithm. The things I remember from the interview:

• They didn't patent it. This means that they ofcourse get the credit (everlasting fame) but don't earn any money with it (compare that to the people that 'invented' RSA ...)
• They were searching for the most simple algorithm. Not something that would require massive processors or mathematical libraries, but an algorithm based on simple instructions, something that could fit on (for example) a small chip (smart-) card.

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Security of selected proposals

[Phoz]

You may wish to check out this website for a quick and clean comparison of the security of the different proposals.