---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 19 Feb 1997 09:24:38 -0500 (EST) From: Christof Paar <christof@ece.WPI.EDU> To: christof@ece.WPI.EDU Subject: (fwd) Rules for The Great DES Replacement Contest Newsgroups: sci.crypt

Rules for The Great DES Replacement Contest

On 1997 Jan 02, the National Institute of Standards and Technology of The Department of Commerce announced the start of a process to approve an "Advanced Encryption Standard." (See the Federal Register Vol. 62, No. 1, pp. 93-94; for example, by going to

http://www.lib.auburn.edu/gpo/index.html

and searching the Federal Register for "Advanced Encryption Standard.")

The first part of the process seems to be requesting comments on the cipher requirements and submission guidelines as follows:

"Proposed Draft Minimum Acceptability Requirements and Evaluation Criteria

"The draft minimum acceptability requirements and evaluation criteria are: A.1 AES shall be publicly defined. A.2 AES shall be a symmetric block cipher. A.3 AES shall be designed so that the key length may be increased as needed. A.4 AES shall be implementable in both hardware and software. A.5 AES shall either be (a) freely available or (b) available under terms consistent with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) patent policy. A.6 Algorithms which meet the above requirements will be judged based on the following factors: (a) Security (i.e., the effort required to cryptanalyze), (b) Computational efficiency, (c) Memory requirements, (d) Hardware and software suitability, (e) Simplicity, (f) Flexibility, and (g) Licensing requirements."

"Proposed Draft Submission Requirements"

"In order to provide for an orderly, fair, and timely evaluation of candidate algorithm proposals, submission requirements will specify the procedures and supporting documentation necessary to submit a candidate algorithm.

B.1 A complete written specification of the algorithm including all necessary mathematical equations, tables, and parameters needed to implement the algorithm. B.2 Software implementation and source code, in ANSI C code, which will compile on a personal computer. This code will be used to compare software performance and memory requirements with respect to other algorithms. B.3 Statement of estimated computational efficiency in hardware and software. B.4 Encryption example mapping a specified plaintext value into ciphertext. B.5 Statement of licensing requirements and patents which may be infringed by implementations of this algorithm. B.6 An analysis of the algorithm with respect to known attacks. B.7 Statement of advantages and limitations of the submitted algorithm."