The AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) is to become the new encryption standard. In contrast with the development of the DES (Data Encryption Standard) and the EES (Escrow Encryption Standard), the development process of AES was open. The motivation was that a new scheme would be easily accepted by the community and widely used by the government and by industry. The outdated DES has been used extensively to protect industrial secrets, protect financial transactions in the billions of dollars, to protect internet security, etc. It is therefore expected that the new AES will also be used in such applications and new ones. After 3 years, a finalist for the AES has recently been chosen. Seeing the critical application of AES an analysis of the security of the AES finalist before it becomes a standard is primordial.
After DES was developed, scientific research lead to new cryptanalytic techniques (such as Differential Cryptanalysis and Linear Cryptanalysis). These techniques are currently used when evaluating new cryptosystems. The goal of the research on the AES finalist is to develop new cryptanalytic techniques that can be used in the future to analyze the AES finalist, its variants, and other future cryptographic algorithms. The ultimate goal is to attempt to break the AES finalist. If this goal would be unachievable, the new techniques may contribute to the scientific understanding of the design of secure ciphers.
