Cryptographic competitions

AES: the Advanced Encryption Standard

The goal of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) competition was to specify "an unclassified, publicly disclosed encryption algorithm capable of protecting sensitive government information well into the next century". The AES competition was organized by the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Requirements

Each AES submission was required to be a block cipher supporting a block length of 128 bits and key lengths of 128, 192, and 256 bits. The call for proposals specified the following evaluation criteria:

• Security ("the most important factor in the evaluation"):
  • "Actual security of the algorithm compared to other submitted algorithms";
  • "The extent to which the algorithm output is indistinguishable from a random permutation on the input block";
  • "Soundness of the mathematical basis for the algorithm's security";
  • "Other security factors raised by the public during the evaluation process, including any attacks which demonstrate that the actual security of the algorithm is less than the strength claimed by the submitter".
• Cost:
  • "Licensing requirements" ("AES shall be available on a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free basis");
  • "Computational efficiency";
  • "Memory requirements".
• "Algorithm and implementation characteristics":
  • "Flexibility" (e.g., additional key sizes, additional block sizes, wide variety of platforms, stream cipher, MAC generator, PRNG, hash);
  • "Hardware and software suitability";
  • "Simplicity".

Timeline

• M-17, 1997.01.02: NIST announces AES competition.
• M-14, 1997.04.15: AES Evaluation Criteria/Submission Requirements Workshop. Gaithersburg.
• M-9, 1997.09.12: NIST issues call for algorithms.
• M0, 1998.06.15: Deadline for submissions.
• M2, 1998.08.20: First AES Candidate Conference. NIST announces 15 AES candidates.
• M9, 1999.03.22–23: Second AES Candidate Conference.
• M14, 1999.08.09: NIST announces its selection of 5 AES finalists.
• M22, 2000.04.13–14: Third AES Candidate Conference.
• M23, 2000.05.15: End of comment period.
• M28, 2000.10.02: NIST announces its selection of AES.

Candidates