FYI:
Tuesday December 4 7:27 PM ET
U.S. Approves New 256-Bit Encryption Standard
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government has updated its encryption standard for computer transmissions, replacing an aging standard first put in place in 1977, the Commerce Department said on Tuesday.
When the new Advanced Encryption Standard, or AES, is adopted by the government and private businesses, it should significantly strengthen the privacy and security of a wide variety of computer transactions, from cash-machine withdrawals to Internet shopping to sensitive e-mails.
``The AES will help the nation protect its critical information infrastructures and ensure privacy for personal information about individual Americans,'' Secretary of Commerce Don Evans said in a press release.
Scientists at the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tested various mathematical formulas for four years before settling on one developed by two Belgian scientists, Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, Commerce said.
The winning formula, called Rijndael, scrambles communications by generating random key numbers 128, 192 or 256 digits long.
A 128-bit key size can create 340 undecillion different possible combinations, or 340 followed by 36 zeros. A 256-key size allows for a total combination set of 11 followed by 76 zeros.
By comparison, the old Data Encryption Standard, or DES, used keys that were 56 digits long, allowing for a total combination set of 72 followed by 15 zeros.
Specialized computers can now crack a DES key after several hours of number crunching, NIST said on its Web site.
Assuming that someone built a machine that could crack a DES key in one second, it would still take that machine 149 trillion years to crack a 128-bit key, according to NIST.
The government will allow AES-enabled software to travel beyond its borders, NIST said. The government for years imposed export limits on the strength of encryption programs before easing them in the 1990s. |
