On Mon, 2 Oct 2000, Vin McLellan <me> wrote:
Apparently the selection of Rijndael -- pronounced "Reign Dahl" or "Rain Doll" -- was not a big surprise to everyone.
Just got a note from Scott Crenshaw, the CEO of NTRU Cryptosystems (<www.ntru.com>, one of the firms I consult for), expressing satisfaction at having "backed the right horse" while others dozed;-)
Paulo Barreto <paulo.barreto@terra.com.br> quipped:
Or it might not have occurred to everyone to prepare just-in-case releases for each of the finalists and wait for NIST's verdict ;-)
Yeah, I thought of that too;-) The NTRU folk, however, didn't wait for today's announcement to place their bet. The NTRU reference implementation for embedded systems -- the NERI toolkit the company has been shipping for a couple of months -- includes Rijndael code described as "an excellent complement to our core public key technology." Anyone know of any other commercial firms (other than the respective developers) which made an overt pre-announcement commitment to one of the AES candidates? Apparently the fact that Rujndael was the/a leading AES candidate was apparent to some prescient souls (not me <sigh>) at least since AES3 in N.Y. last April. As Bram Cohen <bram@gawth.com> put it: .> The selection of Rijndael was actually quite predictable - the round 2 .> report made it pretty clear that the only real contenders were Rijndael .> and Twofish, and hey, that last coin toss is free with 20/20 hindsight :) Suerte, _Vin