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To: Dealer who wrote (5101)	10/2/2000 9:37:47 PM
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INTC--U.S. Backs Belgians' Rijndael for Data Scrambling By Jim Wolf WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A scrambling technique scripted by two Belgians has been chosen as the proposed U.S. government standard to protect sensitive data and help spur the digital economy, the Commerce Department said on Monday. The selection of the Rijndael (pronounced ``Rhine-doll'') data encryption formula capped a three-year worldwide competition among code-cracking experts to replace the aging U.S. benchmark. ``This is a very significant step toward creating a more secure digital economy,'' Commerce Secretary Norman Mineta said in a statement. ``It will allow e-commerce and e-government to flourish safely, creating new opportunities for all Americans.'' The new Advanced Encryption Standard was designed first and foremost to protect sensitive information on U.S. government networks. But the mathematical formulas, or algorithms, involved were expected by experts to be adopted by organizations and businesses worldwide seeking to secure data from prying eyes. Intel Corp. (NasdaqNM:INTC - news), whose microprocessors are the brains of 80 percent of the hundreds of millions of personal computers worldwide, hailed the announcement of the AES finalist as a model of industry-government-academic cooperation. ``In all of my experience in the generation of standards, there has never been a more equitable, judicious and timely process,'' David Aucsmith, Intel's chief security architect, said in a statement. ``Open, Robust And Vetted'' ``As a result of this process, we in industry can begin to incorporate the AES algorithm into our products with confidence that we are using an open, robust and vetted solution,'' he said. The competition was organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an arm of the Commerce Department. It invited the cryptographic community to ``attack,'' or try to break, the encryption formulas under review. The competition winners were Belgian cryptographers Joan Daemen of Proton World International and Vincent Rijmen of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Their formula was chosen because it had the best combination of security, performance, efficiency, ease of implementation and flexibility, the institute said. It said the foreign origin of the proposed standard was of no concern because the complete algorithm and design rationale had been available for review by the Pentagon (news - web sites)'s code-cracking U.S. National Security Agency and the public for more than two years. From the start, the National Institute of Standards and Technology had said it was searching worldwide for a high-quality benchmark to replace the aging Data Encryption Standard adopted in 1977 for protecting sensitive, unclassified U.S. government data. Growth Of Power The security of that benchmark has been threatened by the explosion of computing power that makes it possible for dedicated machines to crack codes relatively easily. The type of encryption at issue involves both an algorithm and a key that can vary from message to message. To decode, one needs to know the key used to encode -- a problem that special DES Cracker machines had solved in recent years by churning through the myriad possible combinations. ``Given the advances of technology since DES was adopted, it is now possible for specially built computers to search through all the possible DES keys in a day or less,'' Edward Roback, acting chief of the institute's computer security division, said in a telephone interview. To plug the gap, the government has recommended the interim use of a variant known as triple DES. The selection of Rijndael as the new proposed standard will be formally announced in the Federal Register in a month or two. It is likely to become the official U.S. benchmark by next June after a 90-day public comment period concludes, the institute makes any changes to its draft recommendation and the commerce secretary approves it. Rijndael, which would come in three different levels of cryptographic strength, is expected to provide strong security for 20 to 30 years or longer, Roback said. Even a machine capable of breaking the old DES standard in a second would take some 149 trillion years to crack the proposed AES's lowest level of security, Jim Foti, a mathematician with the institute, said in an interview.