Status report on the first round of the development of the advanced encryption standard
James Nechvatal, Elaine B. Barker, Donna F. Dodson, Morris J. Dworkin, James Foti, Edward Roback · Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology · 1999
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 has reviewed the results of this research and selected five algorithms (MARS, RC6 ™ , Rijndael, Serpent and Twofish) as finalists.The research results and rationale for the selection of the finalists are documented in this report.The five finalists will be the subject of further study before the selection of one or more of these algorithms for inclusion in the Advanced Encryption Standard.