Schneier on Security

The successor to the aging Data Encryption Standard (DES) will begin to emerge this week as some of the world’s top cryptographers convene to review proposals for a new, advanced encryption standard.

Officials at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) will kick off the first round of “evaluation and analysis” of proposed DES algorithm replacements at the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) Candidate Conference in Ventura, Calif., later this week.

“This is sort of the debut of the candidate algorithms and the opportunity for any interested [cryptographer] to find out how they work,” said Miles Smid, manager of NIST’s security technology group…