Actually I asked him this very thing. After all it's been a few years.
But he pointed out that the full force of the cryptographic community's
analysis was spread out over several candidates. Now that only one has
been selected he said NIST/NSA wanted give it 1 year of focused scrutiny
by the community just to make sure nothing popped out. However the
problem with talking with a cryptanalyst is that they always seem a bit
pessimistic about any cipher they are analyzing.

- Alex

At 08:05 AM 11/13/2001 -0800, Vance Gloster wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Alex Alten" <Altenhome.com>
>Subject: Re: Anyone have a fast AES/Rijndael implementation?
>> I'm not trying to spread rumors, I'm just trying to cross check what
>> I've heard. Certainly Rijndael is under a lot of scrutiny during this
>> 1 year review period. So it wouldn't surprise me if it gets adjusted
>> before becoming the standard. It's a rather common thing for a brand
>> new cipher to get tweaked a bit in response to analysis results.
>
>The bulk of the analysis happened during the two rounds of competition
>between algorithms, which began back in 1997 when the government issued a
>request for proposals. In August 1998 the initial 15 algorithms were
>chosen, then in 1999 it was narrowed down to 5. Then once Rijndael was
>chosen there was another period where comments were taken. February 28th
>the standard was proposed followed by a 90-day comment period on the
>standard (comments on the algorithm itself were assumed to be complete).
>The government is now finalizing the standard, so no, I don't expect any
>tweaks to the algorithm at this stage. It has been under heavy public
>scrutiny for more than three years. But I could be surprised. You can get
>a more in-depth description of the selection process at:
>
>http://csrc.nist.gov/encryption/aes/index2.html#overview
>
>Vance Gloster COMPULSION, n. The eloquence of power.
>vancevancesoft.com -Ambrose Bierce
>http://www.vancesoft.com/vmghome
>
>
>
>

--
Alex Alten
AltenHome.Com

• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]