Rijndael was the surprise winner of the contest for the new Advanced En- cryption Standard (AES) for the United States. This contest was organized and run by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) be- ginning in January 1997; Rijndael was announced as the winner in October 2000. It was the "surprise winner" because many observers (and even some participants) expressed scepticism that the D.S. government would adopt as an encryption standard any algorithm that was not designed by D.S. citizens. Yet NIST ran an open, international, selection process that should serve as...

This Fast Software Encryption workshop was the ninth in a series of workshops started in Cambridge in December 1993. The previous workshop took place in YokohamainApril2001.Itconcentratedonallaspectsoffastprimitivesfor symmetric cryptography: secret key ciphers, the design and cryptanalysis of block and stream ciphers, as well as hash functions and message authentication codes (MACs). The ninth Fast Software Encryption workshop was held in February 2002 in Leuven, Belgium and was organized by General Chair Matt Landrock (Cryp- mathic Belgium), in cooperation with the research group COSIC of...