"Heyman, Michael" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > > Mentioning Dan Bernstein, does anyone know the license that twofish
> > > will be under? I think Bernstein was one of the orginal authors.
The Twofish team was Bruce Schneier, John Kelsey, Doug Whiting, David
Wagner, Chris Hall, and Niels Ferguson. Since then the team has grown
to the "extended Twofish team", which includes Mike Stay and Tadayoshi
Kohno. Perhaps others, I forget...
> Twofish is a (the?) leading contestant for the Advanced Encryption
> Standard (AES) to be chosen by NIST.
There are five remaining candidates for the AES. Twofish and Rijndael
have always been explicitly free from any patent restrictions and
accompanied by liberally-licensed source code. Serpent was at one
stage going to be patented, but the authors changed their minds and it
is now unencumbered. RC6 and Mars are patented and defended, but (as
with all AES entrants) the authors have signed a waiver granting the
world a royalty-free license in perpituity should their cipher be an
AES winner. Recently NIST asked for, and received, a further waiver
that authors would license all of their patents for use with whichever
cipher wins the AES.
Going by the summary of the feedback forms from the AES 3 conference
on NIST's web pages (as well as by the "buzz" at the conference
itself), the three unencumbered ciphers are the most popular on
technical grounds. In fact, the final submission from the Twofish
authors argues that any of those three would make excellent winners;
FWIW I agree. It's far from clear that Twofish is ahead of the other
two.
That the three best-regarded ciphers should be the unpatented ones
should be of interest to patent watchers.
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