due Monday, February 18, 2008

Get familiar with the following webpages:

• NIST AES page

• Overview of the AES Development Effort

• eSTREAM Phase 3

Read selected chapters from the following reports to the extent necessary to perform tasks formulated in Problems 1 and 2.

1. NIST's Report on the Development of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), available at the NIST AES page
    
2. Bruce Schneier, Doug Whiting, "A Performance Comparison of the Five AES Finalists"
    

3. "Hardware performance of the AES finalists - survey and analysis of results," by Kris Gaj and Pawel Chodowiec, available at http://ece.gmu.edu/crypto/publications.htm

4. Christophe De Cannière, "eSTREAM testing framework," available at the eSTREAM Phase 3 Web Site

5. Daniel J. Bernstein, "Cycle counts for authenticated encryption", available at the eSTREAM Phase 3 Web Site

6. Lejla Batina, Sandeep Kumar, Joseph Lano, Kirstin Lemke, Nele Mentens, Christof Paar, Bart Preneel, Kazuo Sakiyama and Ingrid Verbauwhede, "Testing Framework for eSTREAM Profile II Candidates", available at the eSTREAM Phase 3 Web Site

7. T. Good and M. Benaissa, "Hardware results for selected stream cipher candidates", available at the eSTREAM Phase 3 Web Site

8. Kris Gaj, Gabriel Southern and Ramakrishna Bachimanchi, "Comparison of hardware performance of selected Phase II eSTREAM candidates"
   available at the eSTREAM Phase 3 Web Site, presented at SASC 2007, Bochum, Germany, Jan. 31-Feb. 1, 2007.

9. David Hwang, Mark Chaney, Shashi Karanam, Nick Ton, and Kris Gaj, "Comparison of FPGA-Targeted Hardware Implementations of eSTREAM Stream Cipher Candidates" to be presented at SASC 2008, Lausanne, Switzerland, Feb. 13-14, 2008.
    

Create a set of tables describing similarities and differences between the AES and eSTREAM contests in terms of

• goals (types of algorithms, targeted implementation platforms, etc.)

• organization (including period, coordinating and evaluating institutions, number of workshops, funding, voting scheme, etc.)

• number of candidates and origins of submissions by countries and continents

• detailed criteria used for comparing

• security

• performance in software

• performance in hardware

• other factors

• results of the contest

• follow-up standardization effort.

Problem 2 (10 points)

Explain what were the major difficulties in comparing candidates in the AES and eSTREAM contests in terms of

• security

• performance in software

• performance in hardware

• other factors

What were the ways of overcoming these difficulties in each of the contests?