The First Official Crypto-World Rankings

Keith M. Martin and Vincent Rijndael
Cosic World,
Kardinaal Mercierlaan 94
B-3001 Heverlee, Belgium
{keith.martin,vincent.rijmen}@esat.kuleuven.ac.be

Abstract

1  Motivation

We assessed these issues by investigating six measures deemed by the authors as appropriate indicators of cryptological strength. Each measure is considered in turn, with (where appropriate) the top ten nations being attributed a score. These scores are accumulated and, following the immense popularity and success of the FIFA/Coca-Cola-World Ranking system for soccer [4], the final results are presented in the form of the first official Crypto-World Rankings. We hope that nations will be able to use their Crypto-World Ranking in order to enhance grant applications, buy favours from program committees and settle bar disputes, etc. It is our understanding that statistical results should be accompanied by confidence bounds. Thus we state unequivocally that we are very confident in the correctness of the results.

2  Conference paper acceptance

Following analysis of the results in Table 1, we were tempted to make the practical and entirely reasonable adjustment to the sample space that countries under consideration should be at least the size of Rhode Island. However, after much deliberation, we decided to let the results stand uncorrected.

3  AES submissions

4  High office

5  Program committees

6  Conference hosting

7  Newsgroup activity

8  Final scores, rankings and conclusions

Hence from Table 7 it is clear that the country where it is most likely that the person next to you on the bus will be able to generate a blind signature is ... BELGIUM! To put this result to the test we decided to visit the local cafe to find out how many of the clients had heard of Bart Preneel or Jean-Jacques Quisquater, and amazingly there were at least twelve positive responses. Further at least three people had attempted to eat Hasty Pudding during the previous month, and at least one had considered implementing it. This presents extremely strong supporting evidence for the validity of Belgium's number one ranking.

We would like to thank the referees for their kindly words and suggestions for alternative measures of cryptological strength. Per capita spy satellites proved too difficult to count due to Belgium's tendency for overcast nights, per capita companies featuring the buzz syllables Cert and Trust was deemed linguistically biased, per capita attendance at IACR conferences was too tedious to enumerate, and per capita number of key bits exportable was regarded as currently too volatile.

As to why Belgium is the most cryptological country in the world, we can only offer the possible explanation that it is due to the very cryptic nature of the Belgians themselves. Belgians are very secretive people who are very keen to prevent the rest of the world from discovering important facts about Belgium such as which language to speak, which beer to drink, and why anyone would voluntarily eat chicory. It is only through strong cryptography that these secrets can be guaranteed to survive the information age (although the third is probably safe for all time).

References

[1]

NIST's AES homepage, http://www.nist.gov/aes

[2]

Advances in Cryptology, Proceedings Eurocrypt'96, LNCS 1070, U. Maurer, Ed., Springer-Verlag, 1996.

[3]

Advances in Cryptology, Proceedings Eurocrypt'97, LNCS 1233, W. Fumy, Ed., Springer-Verlag, 1997.

[4]

http://www.fifa2.com/

[5]

Fast Software Encryption, LNCS 1039, D. Gollmann, Ed., Springer-Verlag, 1996.

[6]

Fast Software Encryption, LNCS 1267, E. Biham, Ed., Springer-Verlag, 1997.

[7]

Financial Cryptography'97, LNCS 1318, R. Hirschfeld, Ed., Springer-Verlag, 1997.

[8]

Financial Cryptography'98, LNCS 1465, R. Hirschfeld, Ed., Springer-Verlag, 1998.

[9]

http://www.iacr.org