Status report on the first round of the development of the advanced encryption standard

Abstract

In 1997, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) initiated a process to select a symmetric-key encryption algorithm to be used to protect sensitive (unclassified) Federal information in furtherance of NIST’s statutory responsibilities. In 1998, NIST announced the acceptance of 15 candidate algorithms and requested the assistance of the cryptographic research community in analyzing the candidates. This analysis included an initial examination of the security and efficiency characteristics for each algorithm. NIST has reviewed the results of this research and selected five algorithms (MARS, RC6™, Rijndael, Serpent and Twofish) as finalists. The research results and rationale for the selection of the finalists are documented in this report. The five finalists will be the subject of further study before the selection of one or more of these algorithms for inclusion in the Advanced Encryption Standard.

On communication security in wireless ad-hoc sensor networks

“…RC6 is suitable for modification of its security strength because it has an adjustable parameter (number of rounds) that directly affects its strength. The overhead for the RC6 encryption algorithm increases with the strength of the encryption measured by the number of rounds [10]. Our implementation results presented in Section 5 also demonstrate that property.…”

“…Using the ARM System Developers Kit profiling tools, we measured the clock cycles spend for encryption and decryption of a single 128 bit block with a key of length 128, versus the number of algorithmic rounds. In the AES candidate report [10] the number of rounds, determines the security strength of an algorithm. In this report for each algorithm a minimum number of rounds for which the algorithm is considered to be secure (R min ) is presented.…”

Provably Secure Encryption Algorithm based on Feistel Structure

“…As mentioned before, Although Twofish algorithm possesses a large security margin, it has some drawbacks as the analysis of its Key-dependent S-Boxes is complicated and the overall complexity of design has drawn some concern [9]. Moreover, it had the following observations [10] 2) The designers did not produce any significant reason for adding fixed rotations by one bit position in the algorithm except " 3) The fixed rotation by eight bits is intended to lead to conflicts that the cryptanalyst will find that is hard to resolve.…”

Security-Aware Resource Allocation for Real-Time Parallel Jobs on Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Clusters

“…Although the strength of some cryptographic schemes could be orthogonal to their processing overhead, this assumption is generally safe, because many security mechanisms can achieve a higher amount of security by doing more computations [5]. For example, the strength of encryption schemes depends on the size of the key and the number of encryption rounds [21]. Larger key sizes or a number of rounds result in higher levels of security at the cost of additional computation time [5].…”