24.Key Code Esm W900

"NIST hascompleted a study-- it was published last year, but I just saw it recently -- calculating the costs and benefits of the Advanced Encryption Standard." Learn Bruce Schneier's opinion on AES in an interesting article:

The report contains lots of facts and figures relevant to crypto policy debates, including the chaotic nature of crypto markets in the mid-1990s, the number of approved devices and libraries of various kinds since then, other standards that invoke AES, and so on.

There's a lot to argue with about the methodology and the assumptions. I don't know if I buy that the benefits of AES to the economy are in the billions of dollars, mostly because we in the cryptographic community would have come up with alternative algorithms to triple-DES that would have been accepted and used. Still, I like seeing this kind of analysis about security infrastructure. Security is an enabling technology; it doesn't do anything by itself, but instead allows all sorts of things to be done. And I certainly agree that the benefits of a standardized encryption algorithm that we all trust and use outweigh the cost by orders of magnitude.

The link for this article located at Schneier on Security is no longer available.