This volume constitutes the refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Fast Software Encryption (FSE'99), held in Rome, Italy, in March 1999. The 22 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from a total of 51 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The book is divided into sections on advanced encryption standard (AES), remotely keyed encryptions, analysis of block ciphers, miscellaneous, modes of operation and stream ciphers.

Block ciphers encrypt blocks of plaintext, messages, into blocks of ciphertext under the action of a secret key, and the process of encryption is reversed by decryption which uses the same user-supplied key. Block ciphers are fundamental to modern cryptography, in fact they are the most widely used cryptographic primitive - useful in their own right, and in the construction of other cryptographic mechanisms.

In this book the authors provide a technically detailed, yet readable, account of the state of the art of block cipher analysis, design, and deployment. The authors first...