NESSIE (New European Schemes for Signatures, Integrity and Encryption) was a

Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

an research project funded from 2000 to 2003 to identify secure

cryptographic Cryptography, or cryptology (from "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or '' -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More gen ...

primitives. The project was comparable to the

NIST The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical s ...

AES process and the Japanese Government-sponsored

CRYPTREC CRYPTREC is the Cryptography Research and Evaluation Committees set up by the Japanese Government to evaluate and recommend cryptographic techniques for government and industrial use. It is comparable in many respects to the European Union's NESSI ...

project, but with notable differences from both. In particular, there is both overlap and disagreement between the selections and recommendations from NESSIE and CRYPTREC (as of the August 2003 draft report). The NESSIE participants include some of the foremost active

cryptographer Cryptography, or cryptology (from "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or '' -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More gen ...

s in the world, as does the CRYPTREC project. NESSIE was intended to identify and evaluate quality cryptographic designs in several categories, and to that end issued a public call for submissions in March 2000. Forty-two were received, and in February 2003 twelve of the submissions were selected. In addition, five algorithms already publicly known, but not explicitly submitted to the project, were chosen as "selectees". The project has publicly announced that "no weaknesses were found in the selected designs".

Selected algorithms

The selected algorithms and their submitters or developers are listed below. The five already publicly known, but not formally submitted to the project, are marked with a "*". Most may be used by anyone for any purpose without needing to seek a patent license from anyone; a license agreement is needed for those marked with a "#", but the licensors of those have committed to "reasonable non-discriminatory license terms for all interested", according to a NESSIE project press release. None of the six

stream cipher stream cipher is a symmetric key cipher where plaintext digits are combined with a pseudorandom cipher digit stream ( keystream). In a stream cipher, each plaintext digit is encrypted one at a time with the corresponding digit of the keystrea ...

s submitted to NESSIE were selected because every one fell to

cryptanalysis Cryptanalysis (from the Greek ''kryptós'', "hidden", and ''analýein'', "to analyze") refers to the process of analyzing information systems in order to understand hidden aspects of the systems. Cryptanalysis is used to breach cryptographic se ...

. This surprising result led to the eSTREAM project.

Block ciphers

* MISTY1:

Mitsubishi The is a group of autonomous Japanese multinational companies in a variety of industries. Founded by Yatarō Iwasaki in 1870, the Mitsubishi Group traces its origins to the Mitsubishi zaibatsu, a unified company that existed from 1870 to 194 ...

Electric * AES*: (Advanced Encryption Standard) (

, FIPS Pub 197) (aka

Rijndael The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), also known by its original name Rijndael (), is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001. AES is a variant ...

) *

Camellia ''Camellia'' (pronounced or ) is a genus of flowering plants in the family Theaceae. They are found in tropical and subtropical areas in East Asia, eastern and South Asia, southern Asia, from the Himalayas east to Japan and Indonesia. There are ...

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) is a Japanese telecommunications holding company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Ranked 55th in ''Fortune'' Global 500, NTT is the fourth largest telecommunications company in the world in terms of revenue, as well as the third largest pu ...

and Mitsubishi Electric * SHACAL-2: Gemplus

Collision-Resistant Hash Functions

WHIRLPOOL A whirlpool is a body of rotating water produced by opposing currents or a current running into an obstacle. Small whirlpools form when a bath or a sink is draining. More powerful ones formed in seas or oceans may be called maelstroms ( ). ''Vo ...

: Scopus Tecnologia S.A. and K.U.Leuven *

SHA-256 SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2) is a set of cryptographic hash functions designed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and first published in 2001. They are built using the Merkle–Damgård construction, from a one-way compressi ...

SHA-384 SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2) is a set of cryptographic hash functions designed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and first published in 2001. They are built using the Merkle–Damgård construction, from a one-way compression ...

* and

SHA-512 SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2) is a set of cryptographic hash functions designed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and first published in 2001. They are built using the Merkle–Damgård construction, from a one-way compression ...

*: NSA, (US FIPS 180-2)

Message Authentication Codes

* UMAC:

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

Corp, Univ. of Nevada at Reno, IBM Research Laboratory, Technion Institute, and Univ. of California at Davis * Two-Track-MAC:

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven KU Leuven (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) is a Catholic research university in the city of Leuven, Belgium. Founded in 1425, it is the oldest university in Belgium and the oldest university in the Low Countries. In addition to its main camp ...

and debis AG *EMAC: Berendschot et al. *

HMAC In cryptography, an HMAC (sometimes expanded as either keyed-hash message authentication code or hash-based message authentication code) is a specific type of message authentication code (MAC) involving a cryptographic hash function and a se ...

*: (ISO/IEC 9797-1);

Asymmetric encryption schemes

* PSEC-KEM: Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp *RSA-KEM*: RSA key exchange mechanism (draft of ISO/IEC 18033-2) * ACE Encrypt#:

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

Zurich Research Laboratory

Digital signature algorithms

* RSA-PSS: RSA Laboratories * ECDSA: Certicom Corp * SFLASH: Schlumberger Corp (SFLASH was broken in 2007 and should not be used anymore).

Asymmetric Identification Schemes

* GPS-auth: Ecole Normale Supérieure, France Télécom, and La Poste

Other entrants

Entrants that did not get past the first stage of the contest include

Noekeon NOEKEON is a family of two block ciphers designed by Joan Daemen, Michaël Peeters, Gilles Van Assche and Vincent Rijmen and submitted to the NESSIE project in September 2000. The two ciphers are "direct mode" NOEKEON, to be used for maximum ...

, Q, Nimbus, NUSH, Grand Cru,

Anubis Anubis (; ), also known as Inpu, Inpw, Jnpw, or Anpu in Ancient Egyptian (), is the god of funerary rites, protector of graves, and guide to the underworld in ancient Egyptian religion, usually depicted as a canine or a man with a canine hea ...

, Hierocrypt, SC2000, and LILI-128.

Project contractors

The contractors and their representatives in the project were: *

(Prime contractor): Bart Preneel,

Alex Biryukov Alex Biryukov () is a cryptographer, currently a full professor at the University of Luxembourg. Biography His notable work includes the design of the stream cipher LEX, as well as the cryptanalysis of numerous cryptographic primitives. In 1998, ...

, Antoon Bosselaers, Christophe de Cannière, Bart Van Rompay *

École Normale Supérieure École or Ecole may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by Secondary education in France, secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing i ...

Jacques Stern Jacques Stern (born 21 August 1949) is a cryptographer, currently a professor at the École Normale Supérieure. He received the 2006 CNRS Gold medal. His notable work includes the cryptanalysis of numerous encryption and signature schemes, the ...

, Louis Granboulan, Gwenaëlle Martinet *

Royal Holloway Royal Holloway, University of London (RH), formally incorporated as Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, is a public university, public research university and a constituent college, member institution of the federal University of London. It ...

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a collegiate university, federal Public university, public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The ...

: Sean Murphy, Alex Dent, Rachel Shipsey, Christine Swart, Juliette White *

Siemens AG Siemens AG ( ) is a German multinational technology conglomerate. It is focused on industrial automation, building automation, rail transport and health technology. Siemens is the largest engineering company in Europe, and holds the posit ...

: Markus Dichtl, Marcus Schafheutle * Technion Institute of Technology:

Eli Biham Eli Biham () is an Israeli cryptographer and cryptanalyst who is a professor at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology Computer Science department. From 2008 to 2013, Biham was the dean of the Technion Computer Science department, afte ...

, Orr Dunkelman, Vladimir Furman *

Université catholique de Louvain UCLouvain (or Université catholique de Louvain , French for Catholic University of Louvain, officially in English the University of Louvain) is Belgium's largest French-speaking university and one of the oldest in Europe (originally establishe ...

: Jean-Jacques Quisquater, Mathieu Ciet, Francesco Sica * Universitetet i Bergen:

Lars Knudsen Lars Ramkilde Knudsen (born 21 February 1962) is a Denmark, Danish researcher in cryptography, particularly interested in the design and cryptanalysis, analysis of block ciphers, cryptographic hash function, hash functions and message authentic ...

, Håvard Raddum

References

External links

The homepage of the NESSIE project
{{Cryptography navbox , public-key , block , hash College and university associations and consortia in Europe Cryptography contests Cryptography standards Information technology organizations based in Europe Internet and the European Union Research projects