NESSIE (New European Schemes for Signatures, Integrity and Encryption) was a European research project funded from 2000 to 2003 to identify secure

cryptographic Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or '' -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adve ...

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 sci ...

AES process The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), the symmetric block cipher ratified as a standard by National Institute of Standards and Technology of the United States (NIST), was chosen using a process lasting from 1997 to 2000 that was markedly more ...

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 NESSIE ...

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 cryptographers 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 keystream ...

s submitted to NESSIE were selected because every one fell to cryptanalysis. 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 historically descended from the Mitsubishi zaibatsu, a unified company which existed from 1870 ...

Electric *

AES AES may refer to: Businesses and organizations Companies * AES Corporation, an American electricity company * AES Data, former owner of Daisy Systems Holland * AES Eletropaulo, a former Brazilian electricity company * AES Andes, formerly AES Gener ...

*: (Advanced Encryption Standard) (

, FIPS Pub 197) (aka Rijndael) * Camellia: Nippon Telegraph and Telephone and Mitsubishi Electric *

SHACAL-2 SHACAL-1 (originally simply SHACAL) is a 160-bit block cipher based on SHA-1, and supports keys from 128-bit to 512-bit. SHACAL-2 is a 256-bit block cipher based upon the larger hash function SHA-256. Both SHACAL-1 and SHACAL-2 were selected fo ...

: Gemplus

Collision-Resistant Hash Functions

* WHIRLPOOL: Scopus Tecnologia S.A. and K.U.Leuven * SHA-256*, SHA-384* 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 The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collectio ...

, (US FIPS 180-2)

Message Authentication Codes

* UMAC: Intel Corp, Univ. of Nevada at Reno, IBM Research Laboratory, Technion Institute, and Univ. of California at Davis *

Two-Track-MAC Two-Track-MAC algorithm has been selected as a finalist for NESSIE in November 2000 and was conceived as a fast and reliable method to hash data. The development was attended by Bart of Van Rompay ( Eng. ) From the Leuven University ( Katholie ...

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven KU Leuven (or Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) is a Catholic research university in the city of Leuven, Belgium. It conducts teaching, research, and services in computer science, engineering, natural sciences, theology, humanities, medicine, l ...

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 secret ...

*: (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 ACE (advanced cryptographic engine) is the collection of units, implementing both a public key encryption scheme and a digital signature scheme. Corresponding names for these schemes — «ACE Encrypt» and «ACE Sign». Schemes are based on Crame ...

#: IBM Zurich Research Laboratory

Digital signature algorithms

RSA-PSS Probabilistic Signature Scheme (PSS) is a cryptographic signature scheme designed by Mihir Bellare and Phillip Rogaway. RSA-PSS is an adaptation of their work and is standardized as part of PKCS#1 v2.1. In general, RSA-PSS should be used as a re ...

: 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, Q, Nimbus, NUSH, Grand Cru, Anubis,

Hierocrypt In cryptography, Hierocrypt-L1 and Hierocrypt-3 are block ciphers created by Toshiba in 2000. They were submitted to the NESSIE project, but were not selected. Both algorithms were among the cryptographic techniques recommended for Japanese gover ...

, SC2000, and

LILI-128 LILI-128 is an LFSR based Synchronization (computer science), synchronous stream cipher with a 128-bit key. On 13 November 2000, LILI-128 was presented at the NESSIE workshop. It is designed to be simple to implement in both software and hardware. ...

Project contractors

The contractors and their representatives in the project were: *

(Prime contractor):

Bart Preneel Bart Preneel (born 15 October 1963 in Leuven, Belgium) is a Flemish cryptographer and cryptanalyst. He is a professor at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, in the COSIC group. He was the president of the International Association for Cryptologic R ...

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

, Antoon Bosselaers, Christophe de Cannière, Bart Van Rompay * École Normale Supérieure:

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, th ...

, Louis Granboulan, Gwenaëlle Martinet * Royal Holloway, University of London:

Sean Murphy Sean Murphy may refer to: Sports * Seán Óg Murphy (1897–1956), Irish hurler * Seán Murphy (hurler) (born 1947), Irish hurler * Seán Murphy (Gaelic footballer) (born 1932), Irish Gaelic football player * Sean Murphy (footballer, born 1995), Sc ...

, Alex Dent, Rachel Shipsey, Christine Swart, Juliette White * Siemens AG: Markus Dichtl, Marcus Schafheutle * Technion Institute of Technology: Eli Biham, Orr Dunkelman, Vladimir Furman *

Université catholique de Louvain The Université catholique de Louvain (also known as the Catholic University of Louvain, the English translation of its French name, and the University of Louvain, its official English name) is Belgium's largest French-speaking university. It ...

Jean-Jacques Quisquater Jean-Jacques Quisquater (born 13 January 1945) is a Belgian cryptographer and a professor at University of Louvain (UCLouvain). He received, with Claus P. Schnorr, the RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics in 2013, and the ESORICS Outstanding ...

, Mathieu Ciet, Francesco Sica *

Universitetet i Bergen The University of Bergen ( no, Universitetet i Bergen, ) is a research-intensive state university located in Bergen, Norway. As of 2019, the university has over 4,000 employees and 18,000 students. It was established by an act of parliament in 19 ...

: Lars Knudsen, Håvard Raddum

References

External links

The homepage of the NESSIE project
{{Cryptography navbox , public-key , hash , block Cryptography contests Cryptography standards Research projects