AES candidates

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the US Department of Commerce began an initiative in 1997 under the name of "Advanced Encryption Standard" (AES) that was aimed at standardising a new algorithm which should replace the DES algorithm in future in all applications and on all platforms.

In a public and transparent process, one algorithm is to be selected as successor to the DES out of all the suggestions publicly submitted.

At the second AES Conference on 22/23 March 1999 in Rome, the algorithms which at the time were up for discussion and the analyses performed with them were presented and discussed. The conference was attended by approx. 180 persons from 23 countries, and 21 papers were presented.

In the first round there were 15 proposals, from which the final AES algorithm is to be selected over several stages. Further information on this is available from http://www.nist.gov/aes.

In the second round five proposals were left in the running, MARS, RC6, Rijndael, Serpent and Twofish.

Requirements which a new algorithm must satisfy:

In an appeal issued by NIST on 12 September 1997 the following requirements which a successor to the DES must satisfy were defined.

Symmetric block cipher

On 2 October 2000 the winner of the AES competition was announced, and the Belgian Rijndael algorithm has been proposed for FIPS standardisation, thus being the designated successor to the now somewhat elderly Data Encryption Standard.