BELGIAN FORMULA WINS COMPETITION TO BECOME ENCRYPTION STANDARD.NIST (National Institute of Standards & Technology, Washington, DC, www.nist.gov) The standards-defining agency of the U.S. government, formerly the National Bureau of Standards. It is one of three agencies that fall under the Technology Administration (www.technology. has named the Rijndael (pronounced Rhine-doll) data encryption data encryption, the process of scrambling stored or transmitted information so that it is unintelligible until it is unscrambled by the intended recipient. Historically, data encryption has been used primarily to protect diplomatic and military secrets from foreign formula as its choice for the nation's proposed new Advanced Encryption Standard (cryptography, algorithm) Advanced Encryption Standard - (AES) The NIST's replacement for the Data Encryption Standard (DES). The Rijndael /rayn-dahl/ symmetric block cipher, designed by Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, was chosen by a NIST contest to be AES. (AES). The selection caps a 3 year international competition organized to develop a strong formula to protect sensitive information in federal computer systems. Many businesses are expected to use the AES as well. Rijndael was selected because it had the best combination of security, performance, efficiency, ease of implementation and flexibility. Researchers from 12 different countries participated in the global competition. NIST invited the worldwide cryptographic community to "attack" the 15 candidate encryption formulas in an effort to break the codes. After narrowing the field down to five, NIST asked for intensified attacks on the finalists. Experts also evaluated the encoding formulas for factors such as security, speed and versatility. The proposed selection of Rijndael as the AES will be announced formally in the Federal Register in several months, and NIST then will receive public comments on the draft Federal Information Processing Standard Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) are publicly announced standards developed by the United States Federal government for use by all non-military government agencies and by government contractors. for 90 days. When approved by the spring of 2001, the AES will be a public algorithm designed to protect sensitive government information well into the 21st century. It will replace the aging Data Encryption Standard See DES. Data Encryption Standard - (DES) The NBS's popular, standard encryption algorithm. It is a product cipher that operates on 64-bit blocks of data, using a 56-bit key. It is defined in FIPS 46-1 (1988) (which supersedes FIPS 46 (1977)). , which NIST adopted in 1977. |
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