http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/14212.html Entrust Goes to Round One Wired News Report 9:45am 4.Aug.98.PDT Entrust has moved one step closer to the security and cryptography industry's most prestigious contract in years -- the next data-scrambling standard for use by the US government. The security firm said Tuesday that its new data-scrambling algorithm, called CAST-256, has been selected as a candidate for the first round of testing of the new Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cipher. Once blessed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the winning AES candidate will replace the current data-scrambling standard, called Data Encryption Algorithm. The US government uses the Data Encryption Algorithm to encrypt and decrypt nonclassified documents, but anyone can use it without a license. The cipher was considered secure when it was first invented two decades ago, but the government is concerned that advances in computing power have made it more vulnerable. Enter AES, which is designed to carry the US government well into the next century. On 20-21 of August, the companies and organizations vying for the standard (and anyone else who is interested) will come together at a conference to evaluate and analyze each other's work. The National Institute of Standards and Technology will announce all of the AES candidates at the conference, to be held in Ventura, California. So far, 14 organizations have publicly announced their submissions, and some peer review -- the process of attacking and picking apart the ciphers -- is already underway. Following the conference, an Institute spokesperson said that the government will narrow its choices down to five or six finalists. The final decision is expected to take approximately two years. The spokesperson declined to comment on Entrust's Tuesday announcement. With CAST-256, Entrust joins crypto heavyweights IBM and RSA Data Security in the running for the new standard. "[CAST-256] is based very heavily on something that is well tested and well analyzed," said Carlisle Adams, one of the co-inventors of the Entrust cipher. "A lot of the others are fairly new -- wherein all aspects of the cipher are new -- and in our case we tried to reuse things that were already proven," he said. -o- Subscribe: mail majordomoat_private with "subscribe isn". Today's ISN Sponsor: New Dimensions International [www.newdimensions.net]
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