NESSIE
New European Schemes for Signatures, Integrity, and Encryption
IST-1999-12324
NESSIE is a project within the Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme of the European Commission (Key Action II, Action Line II.4.1).
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The main objective of the project is to put forward a portfolio of strong
cryptographic primitives that has been obtained after an open call and been
evaluated using a transparent and open process. The project intends to
contribute to the final phase of the AES block
cipher standardisation process (organised by NIST, US), but will also launch
an independent open call for a broad set of primitives providing
confidentiality, data integrity, and authentication. These primitives include
block ciphers, stream ciphers, hash functions, MAC algorithms, digital signature
schemes, and public-key encryption schemes. The project will develop an
evaluation methodology (both for security and performance evaluation) and a
software toolbox to support the evaluation. The project goal is to widely
disseminate the project results and to build consensus based on these results by
using the appropriate fora (a project industry board, 5th Framework programme, and
various standardisation bodies). A final objective is to maintain the strong
position of European research while strengthening the position of European
industry in cryptography.
In a first phase, an open call for the
submission of cryptographic primitives as well as for evaluation
methodologies for these primitives is published. This call includes a request
for the submission of block ciphers (as for the AES call), but also of other
cryptographic primitives including hash functions, additive stream ciphers, and
digital signature algorithms. In addition, it asks for evaluation methodologies
for these primitives. The scope of the call is defined together with the project
industry board. This call has been
published in March 2000. In parallel, a software toolbox will be developed
for generic and, later on, specific evaluations of primitives, taking into
account the submitted testing methodologies. A first part of the security
evaluation will consist of an analysis of the AES finalists, resulting in joint
comments towards NIST (US). Next, the evaluation of submitted primitives will
start off with a fast screening of the submissions followed by a first
evaluation. In parallel, a first performance evaluation will be executed, only
implementing critical parts of the algorithms. Based on this evaluation, a set
of submissions will be shortlisted (finalists). The second phase of the project
will consist of a thorough security evaluation of the finalists, combined with a
performance evaluation that will produce realistic performance estimates of
optimised implementations (including software, hardware, and smart card). This
will allow for comparing the speed of the primitives on a fair and equal basis.
The final results (a recommended portfolio of cryptographic primitives) will be
widely disseminated and entered into the relevant standardisation bodies.
The NESSIE evaluation process is an open process. Thus as part of the
evaluation process, the NESSIE project welcomes comments about both submitted
primitives and the evaluation process. To facilitate this process, four NESSIE
workshops will be organised. The first took
place on 13-14 November 2000, shortly after the deadline for submission of
primitives. The
second workshop took place on 12-13 September 2001, shortly after the end of
the first phase of the project, the third workshop took place on
6-7 November 2002, and
the
fourth workshop takes place on 26-27 February 2003
(jointly with the STORK project).
A timetable for the NESSIE project is given below.
| 2000 | January | Beginning of first phase of NESSIE |
| 2000 | January | Creation of Industry Board |
| 2000 | March | Call for Cryptographic Primitives |
| 2000 | September | Submission deadline |
| 2000 | November | First NESSIE workshop |
| 2001 | June | Preliminary assessment of submissions |
| 2001 | June | End of first phase of NESSIE |
| 2001 | July | Beginning of second phase of NESSIE |
| 2001 | September | Second NESSIE workshop |
| 2002 | February | Preliminary selection of submissions |
| 2002 | May | Standardisation Plan |
| 2002 | November | Third NESSIE workshop |
| 2003 | February | Fourth NESSIE workshop |
| 2003 | March | Final selection of submissions |
| 2003 | March | Final report of NESSIE project |
| 2003 | March | End of second phase of NESSIE |
The project may recommend a different block cipher than AES (if
technical reasons support this), and will recommend primitives that can be used
for challenging environments such as Gigabit networking, wireless
communications, PDAs, and smart cards. The recommended primitives for digital
signatures can support the European Electronic
Signature Standardisation Initiative. By-products of the process will be an
evaluation methodology and the improvement of the state-of-the-art in the area.
The project will build consensus within the European security industry and
gather support for the standardisation effort through a project industry board
and through the 5th Framework programme. Members of the project industry board
are: Algorithmic Research (Israel), Amtec SpA (I), Baltimore Technologies (IRL),
Cryptomathic (DK), Deutsche Telekom AG (D), Entrust Technologies (CH), Ericsson
Radio Systems AB (SE), Europay International (B), Gemplus (F), Hewlett-Packard
Laboratories (UK), Isabel (B), KPN Research (NL), NDS (Israel), Nokia (Finland),
Oberthur Card Systems (F), RSA Laboratories Europe (SE), Security Design
International (UK), STMicroelectronics (F), S.W.I.F.T. (B), Telenor Research
(N), Telsy Elettronica SpA (I), Thomson-CSF (F), Thomson Multimedia (F), Utimaco
(D), Vodafone (UK), Zaxus (UK).
| Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (Prime Contractor) | Bart Preneel, Alex Biryukov, Antoon Bosselaers, Christophe De Cannière, Bart Van Rompay |
| École Normale Supérieure, France | Jacques Stern, Louis Granboulan |
| Royal Holloway, University of London, U.K | Sean Murphy |
| Siemens AG, Germany | Markus Dichtl |
| Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel | Eli Biham |
| Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium | Jean-Jacques Quisquater, Mathieu Ciet, Francesco Sica> |
| Universitetet i Bergen, Norway | Lars Knudsen |
Prof. Bart Preneel
K.U.Leuven
Department Electrical Engineering-ESAT, Division SISTA/COSIC
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10
B-3001 Heverlee
Belgium
Tel.: +32-16-321148
Fax: +32-16-321969