The National Institute of Standards and Technology has chosen 15 entrants for the race to find an effective means of encrypting and decrypting federal data in the next century. Data is encrypted, or scrambled, to protect it from scrutiny and tampering during transmission.
The 15 entrants, from 12 nations, submitted formulas that met NIST's minimum standards. Now cryptographic specialists, including hackers, are being invited to "attack" the formulas so that any weaknesses are exposed. Meanwhile, NIST will be evaluating other aspects of the entries.
The winner, to be chosen by 2001, will replace today's official scheme, known as the Data Encryption Standard. DES, probably the most widely used encryption technique in both the public and private sectors, was developed by IBM Corp. and adopted in 1977 as the federal standard for securing sensitive but unclassified data. Powerful, high-speed computers now can decode DES-encrypted data by trying out all the possible combinations of letters and numbers.
Like DES, the candidates to become the new encryption formula, which have names such as SERPENT and TWOFISH, lock and unlock data with "keys" to the code. There are so many possible keys for the candidate code that finding the one used for a specific transmission will be impossible for many years to come. At the lowest level of protection, says a NIST spokesperson, the number of possible keys is "340 followed by 36 zeroes."
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