William E. Burr

Report on the Development of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)

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 reviewed the results of this preliminary research and selected MARS, RC™, Rijndael, Serpent and Twofish as finalists. Having reviewed further public analysis of the finalists, NIST has decided to propose Rijndael as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). The research results and rationale for this selection are documented in this report.

Selecting the Advanced Encryption Standard

The USA National Institute of Standards and Technology selected the Advanced Encryption Standard, a new standard symmetric key encryption algorithm, from 15 qualifying algorithms. NIST has also made efforts to update and extend their standard cryptographic modes of operation.

Cryptographic hash standards: where do we go from here?

Successful attacks against the two most commonly used cryptographic hash functions, MD5 and SHA-1, have triggered a kind of feeding frenzy in the cryptographic community. Many researchers are now working on hash function attacks, and we can expect new results in this area for the next several years. This article discusses the SHA-1 attack and the US National Institute of Standards and Technologys (NISTs) plans for SHA-1 and hash functions in general

An overview of the proposed american national standard for local distributed data interfaces

The Local Distributed Data Interface (LDDI) Project of X3 Technical Committee X3T9 has resulted in three draft proposed American National Standards for a high performance local area network. The proposed standards are organized in accordance with the ISO Reference Model for Open Systems Interconnection and encompass the lowest two protocol layers (data link and physical) of the model, plus a serial broadband coaxial bus interface. The intended application of the LDDI is as a backend network for the interconnection of high performance CPUs and block transfer peripherals such as magnetic disk and tapes. A carrier-sense multiple access with collision prevention (CSMA-CP) distributed bus arbitration protocol is employed. The cable interface supports the attachment of up to 28 ports over a cable distance of 0.5 km (8 ports may be attached to a 1 km cable) at a transfer rate of 50 Mbit/s.

Recommendation for Key Management - Part 2: Best Practices for Key Management Organization

Special Publication 800-57 provides cryptographic key management guidance. It consists of three parts. Part 1 provides general guidance and best practices for the management of cryptographic keying material. Part 2 provides guidance on policy and security planning requirements for U.S. government agencies. Finally, Part 3 provides guidance when using the cryptographic features of current systems.

NIST and Computer Security

The US National Institute of Standards and Technologys highly visible work in four key areas - cryptographic standards, role-based access control, identification card standards, and security automation - as and continues to shape computer and information security at both national and global levels. This article is part of a special issue on NIST contributions to IT.