Each year, the Federal Government spends more than $140 billion on research and development (R&D). Approximately $40 billion is used to support intramural research and Federally funded R&D centers, a relatively small portion of which goes to the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) in support of a wide array of research and technology development projects. The creation of new technology— typically a virtual partnership of public and private funding, and increasingly a formal partnership—is the single most important contributor to the nation’s long-term economic growth path. Citizens and policymakers hope and expect that Federal tax dollars will be spent wisely. This study looks at the issue in a microcosm: an evaluative case study of the economic impacts of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) Program.
Cryptography is a branch of applied mathematics concerned with developing complex algorithms for scrambling information ("plaintext") into an indecipherable version of that information ("ciphertext") and back to plaintext. The basics of cryptography as it applies to the AES algorithm are discussed in Section 2.1, Cryptography ABCs. In 1993, the Computer Security Division (CSD) of NIST's Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) decided that the existing standard (Federal Information Process Standard--FIPS--46-2, "Data Encryption Standard (DES)", adopted in 1977) was growing vulnerable in the face of advances in cryptanalysis and the exponential growth in computing power. This impact assessment covers the period from 1996-2017. In 1996, CSD began to plan seriously for the process that would replace DES with AES (FIPS-197), and the process for assuring conformance to AES as spelled out in the companion standard, the Cryptographic Algorithm Validation Program and the Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CAVP, CMVP, FIPS-140-2). That process—referred to in this document as the AES program—is the focus of this report. [This publication was produced as part of Contract SB134117RQ0572 with the National Institute of Standards and Technology.]
Each year, the Federal Government spends more than $140 billion on research and development (R&D). Approximately $40 billion is used to support intramural research and Federally funded R&D centers, a relatively small portion of which goes to the National Institutes of Standards and Technology...
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Each year, the Federal Government spends more than $140 billion on research and development (R&D). Approximately $40 billion is used to support intramural research and Federally funded R&D centers, a relatively small portion of which goes to the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) in support of a wide array of research and technology development projects. The creation of new technology— typically a virtual partnership of public and private funding, and increasingly a formal partnership—is the single most important contributor to the nation’s long-term economic growth path. Citizens and policymakers hope and expect that Federal tax dollars will be spent wisely. This study looks at the issue in a microcosm: an evaluative case study of the economic impacts of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) Program.
Cryptography is a branch of applied mathematics concerned with developing complex algorithms for scrambling information ("plaintext") into an indecipherable version of that information ("ciphertext") and back to plaintext. The basics of cryptography as it applies to the AES algorithm are discussed in Section 2.1, Cryptography ABCs. In 1993, the Computer Security Division (CSD) of NIST's Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) decided that the existing standard (Federal Information Process Standard--FIPS--46-2, "Data Encryption Standard (DES)", adopted in 1977) was growing vulnerable in the face of advances in cryptanalysis and the exponential growth in computing power. This impact assessment covers the period from 1996-2017. In 1996, CSD began to plan seriously for the process that would replace DES with AES (FIPS-197), and the process for assuring conformance to AES as spelled out in the companion standard, the Cryptographic Algorithm Validation Program and the Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CAVP, CMVP, FIPS-140-2). That process—referred to in this document as the AES program—is the focus of this report. [This publication was produced as part of Contract SB134117RQ0572 with the National Institute of Standards and Technology.]
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Keywords
cryptography; encryption; economic impact