Reply From: Gary Mounfield <mani@pride.sepulchre.org>
> Entrust Goes to Round One
> Wired News Report
This charming little fluff piece strikes me as extremely unprofessional.
For starters the official announcement of the successful candidate
algorithms isn't out (that I've seen yet). It should appear on
http://csrc.nist.gov/encryption/aes/aes_home.htm shortly. What Entrust are
"announcing" is that they are one of a large number of candidate
algorithms for the AES, hardly worthy of a fluff piece like this.
> 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.
I have a problem with this. AES is actually somewhat of a poisoned chalice
- it is a hugely prestigious matter to have your algorithm selected as the
AES, whether you're IBM or BruceS but there are great big strings
attached. Prime among these is the fact that you have to give up *all
rights* to your algorithm, the idea being that a federally mandated crypto
standard should be available universally without restriction. There is a
possibility that the winning entrant will be allowed keep the rights to a
highly optimised *implementation* but they will lose the rights to the
actual algorithm.
For those who care Proff has a mailing list setup on suburbia.net
(aes-request@suburbia.net with subject Subscribe) to discuss AES and such
like. John Young also has a reat deal of useful information and links on
Cryptome.
Gary Mounfield
-o-
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Received on Wed Aug 5 18:39:47 1998