Announcement: $10,000 Twofish Cryptanalysis Contest

[Bruce Schneier <schneier@counterpane.com>]

To stimulate research into Twofish, the designers are putting their money
where their mathematics is. They are offering $10,000 in prize money for
the best attack on Twofish during the first round of the AES evaluation.

This contest is very different from most other cryptanalysis contests.
There is no ciphertext to decrypt, and no key to find. Instead, the $8,000
first prize will be awarded to the person or group (other than the Twofish
design team) that publishes the best cryptanalysis of Twofish. The runner
up will get a $2,000 second prize.  To qualify the cryptanalysis has to
contain a significant new result not published earlier by the Twofish team.
If no new results are published, the prizes will not be awarded. The
deadline of the contest is NIST's deadline for first-round AES comments;
the result should be presented in a format compatible with the NIST
requirements for first-round comments.  Decisions of the judges (the
Twofish design team) are final.

Good luck,
Bruce 

**********************************************************************
Bruce Schneier, President, Counterpane Systems     Phone: 612-823-1098
101 E Minnehaha Parkway, Minneapolis, MN  55419      Fax: 612-823-1590
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