The longer the key size the harder it is to crack. It is unclear how or if the new encryption standard will affect the U.S. government's controversial policy which severely restricts the export of encryption stronger than 56-bits. U.S. software companies complain that the policy harms them because strong encryption is widely available outside the U.S. and U.S. vendors are losing money as a result. The U.S. government argues that it needs to control the export of strong encryption for national security purposes to fight terrorism. The government wants vendors to develop encryption software that includes a key recovery mechanism whereby the government could get access to the algorithm to decode a message for law enforcement purposes.
Vendors are generally opposed to that plan.
Ten of the AES proposals come from the U.S., but other countries represented are Canada, South Korea, Norway, France, Japan, Costa Rica, Australia, Germany, the U.K. and Israel. Companies submitting proposals include Deutsche Telekom AG of Germany, NTT Corp. of Japan, and in the U.S. IBM, Entrust Technologies Inc., RSA Laboratories, Cylink Corp. and Counterpane Systems, which is headed by cryptography expert Bruce Schneier. NIST's AES page Includes documentation for the 15 proposals, as well as an online forum on them. Some companies are hoping you would. Experts Exchange Get answers to your networking questions.