CDR: Re: Rijndael & NTRU

[Vin McLellan]

         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 at 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 at 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