NIST has just announced that the finalists in the Advanced Encryption Standard competition are MARS, RC6, Rijndael, Serpent and Twofish. That makes three US algorithms, one Belgian, and one which I developed in collaboration with colleagues in Israel and Norway. It may be of interest that, under the export controls on intangibles which the DTI pushed in their recent White Paper and which they are now trying to have adopted as an EU regulation, I would have needed a personal export licence from the DTI in order to do this work. (Nigel has confirmed this.) It seems somewhat unlikely that a licence would have been granted. Arms exporters complain to me that DTI officials are notorious for blocking licences to punish them for such `offences' as complaining about the licensing process. So perhaps I would have not done the work; perhaps I'd have defied the law and now be involved in a huge test case in the European Court; perhaps I'd have emigrated; perhaps we'd just not do research in collaboration with foreigners. Who knows? Ross The AES announcement is at: http://csrc.nist.gov/encryption/aes/aes_home.htm The University of Cambridge press release is at: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/serpentpr.html The Serpent home page is at: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/serpent.html
