Australian Gov't Offers $560k Cryptographic Protocol For Free
mask.of.sanity writes "Australia's national welfare agency will release its 'unbreakable' AU$560,000 smart card identification protocol for free. The government agency wants other departments and commercial businesses to adopt the Protocol for Lightweight Authentication of ID (PLAID), which withstood three years of design and testing by Australian and American security agencies. The agency has one of Australia's most advanced physical and logical converged security systems: staff can access doors and computers with a single centrally-managed identity card, and user identities can be automatically updated as employees leave, are recruited or move to new departments. PLAID, which will be available soon, is to be used in the agency's incoming fleet of contact-less smartcards that are currently under trial by staff. It will replace existing identity cards that operate on PKI encryption."
Can it be referred to as the Former Lightweight Authentication of ID, or FLACID?
That's a much better acronym than the originally proposed Protocol for Automated National Identification and Control.
...which withstood three years of design and testing by Australian and American security agencies
Anything that withstands three years of attempted government design must be robust indeed.
Dark Helmet: Yes, we're gonna have to go right to ludicrous speed... Lonestar: It's Spaceball 1. Barf: They've gone to plaid! ...
While some crypto protocols are capable of ludicrous speed, this protocol can go plaid.