“Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, two Belgian mathematicians, won a U.S.-sponsored global competition in 2000 to design the encryption system that will henceforth encode the secret communications of the U.S. government,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Any credible encryption scheme is tested publically, unlike many of the proprietary electronic-voting systems pushed after the Florida voting debacle:
Proprietary balloting software leaked by corporate insiders has been discovered by outside evaluators to be full of security holes. Thus, the good folks working to guarantee secret ballots should learn something from the people who work to guarantee secret messages. They never trust anyone who says “trust us.”
The basic approach in modern cryptography is to keep the pattern of your specific key a secret, but not to worry if the overall design of your lock gets out. It’s called Kerckhoffs’ Principle, after Auguste Kerckhoffs, a 19th-century cryptographer who, like Messrs. Daemen and Rijmen, was Flemish. He listed six guidelines for a reliable encryption system. No. 2 was, ‘It must not be required to be secret, and it must be able to fall into the hands of the enemy without inconvenience.’
The idea is counterintuitive, and for most of the long history of secret codes, it was ignored. But with the rise of computer-assisted cryptography in the past 50 years or so, there has been a sea change in the working assumptions of cryptographers. Now, ‘you can’t get good cryptography by designing in secret,’ says Whitfield Diffie, co-inventor of the ‘public key’ encryption system that revolutionized the field, and currently chief security officer at Sun Microsystems.