AES competition/Catalogs/AES players

The AES competition involved many of the world's top cryptographers.

Some of the major developments in cryptography before AES were:
 * DES from an IBM team that included Don Coppersmith
 * Differential cryptanalysis, discovered by Coppersmith et al, but kept secret at NSA request. Re-discovered and first published in open literature by Eli Biham and Adi Shamir.
 * Linear cryptanalysis, from Mitsuru Matsui.
 * The RSA algorithm for public key cryptography, from Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman.

At least two writers have proposed methods of making ciphers provably resistant to linear and differential cryptanalysis, Carlisle Adams in CAST and Serge Vaudenay with his decorrelation theory.

Standard references in the field include Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography and Ross Anderson's Security Engineering.

Most of the people mentioned above, and a number of others well-known in the field, participated in the AES process.

Here is a table showing some of the major players. For many papers, some of the co-authors are omitted to keep it simple; see references in the main article for complete co-author lists.

Quite a few of these people are also well-known for breaking various ciphers. Perhaps the best-publicised break was Wagner and Ian Goldberg cracking Netscape's SSL via flaws in the random number generator. Anderson or his students break almost every smartcard that comes on the market. Knudsen, Biham, Schneier and Kelsey have all published many papers on cryptanalysis of various ciphers. Some of the others have various breaks to their credit as well.