EU approves Mitsubishi Electric codes

An influential European Union board has approved two types of ciphers developed by Mitsubishi Electric Corp. as “highly practical and strong cryptographic algorithms,” the electronics company said Thursday.

The EU board, a group of researchers under the New European Schemes for Signatures, Integrity and Encryption (NESSIE), endorsed the two ciphers — the 64-bit block cipher MISTY 1 and the 128-bit block cipher Camellia, the company said.

NESSIE is a three-year project funded by the European Commission and organized by European researchers of cryptography. The project was launched in 2000.

The project is designed to build a universal industrywide consensus for future use of excellent encryption and decryption technologies, which may be useful for e-commerce.

The main objective of the NESSIE project is to select and promote a group of strong cryptographic technologies through a transparent evaluation process organized by researchers from the governments of seven developed countries and major global electronics companies.

“As a result of these technical evaluations, the NESSIE board reached the conclusion that both the MISTY 1 and Camellia are excellent ciphers in terms of security and practicality,” the company said in a statement.

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. researchers also joined in the developmental process of Camellia, the firm said.

MISTY 1 was the only cipher the EU board selected in the 64-bit block cipher category and Camellia was selected in the 128-bit block cipher category as well as AES, a current U.S. governmental standard, it said.

In 2000, another of the company’s ciphers, a variant of MISTY dubbed KASUMI, was adopted as the mandatory standard for the third-generation mobile phone communications system, called W-CDMA.

Earlier, the Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications Ministry and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry officially approved MISTY 1 and Camellia for Japanese government use.