AES competition/Catalogs/AES players

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The AES competition involved many of the world's top cryptographers.

Some of the major developments in cryptography before AES were:

At least two writers have proposed methods of making ciphers provably resistant to linear and differential cryptanalysis, Carlisle Adams in CAST and Serge Vaudenay with his decorrelation theory.

Standard references in the field include Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography [1] and Ross Anderson's Security Engineering [2].

A direct ancestor of Rijndael, the winning AES candidate was the Square block cipher designed by Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen. Lars Knudsen invented a new attack, integral cryptanalysis, to break it.

Most of the people mentioned above, and a number of others well-known in the field, participated in the AES process.

Here is a table showing some of the major players. For several papers, some of the co-authors are omitted to make the table more readable; see references in the main article for complete co-author lists.

AES cipherTeam includedAnalysis from
RijndaelRijmen, DaemenFerguson, Schroeppel, Whiting
TwofishSchneier, Kelsey, Whiting, Wagner, Ferguson
SerpentAnderson, Biham, Knudsen
RC6Rivest
MARSCoppersmith
Hasty PuddingSchroeppel
FROGSchneier, Wagner, Ferguson
MagentaSchneier, Biham, Shamir, Ferguson, Knudsen
E2Matsui
DEALKnudsenSchneier, Kelsey
DFCVaudenayKnudsen, Rijmen
CAST-256Adams

Quite a few of these people are also well-known for breaking ciphers or other security systems. Perhaps the best-publicised break was Wagner and Ian Goldberg cracking Netscape's SSL via flaws in the random number generator. Anderson or his students break almost every smartcard that comes on the market. Knudsen, Biham, Schneier and Kelsey have all published many papers on cryptanalysis of various ciphers. Some of the others have various breaks to their credit as well.

References

  1. Schneier, Bruce (2nd edition, 1996,), Applied Cryptography, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-11709-9
  2. Ross Anderson. Security Engineering.