Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
January 2, 1997:
Solicitation for initiative; submission of candidates by
September 12, 1997.
April 15, 1997:
A public AES workshop was held to formulate the exact
requirements. Cryptographers all over the world began
developing appropriate algorithms.
August 20, 1998:
First AES conference; NIST announced receipt of 15
candidates. Public study began.
March 1999:
Second AES conference; discussion of current results. 28
candidates from all over the world were submitted and
made accessible on the homepage several weeks prior to
the conference in order to hold the conference on as high
a level as possible.
April 15, 1999:
End of public study of all candidates. Five candidates
(MARS, RC6, Rijndael, Serpent, Twofish) were
short-listed. Further work was then concentrated on these
five algorithms.
April 13/14, 2000:
Third AES conference; the analyses of the five final
candidates were presented and discussed.
May 15, 2000:
End of public discussion.
October 2, 2000:
Announcement of Rijndael as the “winner”.
November 2000:
Publication of the FIPS standard as a manuscript; request
for public comments.
February 2001:
End of public discussion on the standard.
April - June 2001:
Approval as FIPS standard.
Figure 5.18:
Timeline of the AES Initiative.
Or better yet, a preferred field of use (smartcards, online encryption,
...
) should
be stated for each algorithm. This kind of flexibility would clearly have more
benefits than drawbacks. Products fixed on a specific method would become
insecure instantly if, against all odds, a weakness were detected in the method.
A warning example is the use of DES in banking applications, which had
bet on it exclusively for twenty years. The migration to 3DES took years and
devoured huge sums.
The decision the NIST took turned out to be anything but the expected — only
the
Rijndael
algorithm by the Belgian authors Joan Daemen and Vincent
