How has the public been involved in the development of the AES?
From the beginning of the AES development effort, NIST has relied on the public’s participation, including: a. assisting NIST in the design of submission requirements and evaluation criteria (including minimum key and block size requirements and intellectual property requirements); b. developing and submitting candidate algorithms; c. analyzing the candidates and sharing those results with the public and NIST; d. actively participating in several international conferences; and e. commenting on the the Draft FIPS for the AES. NIST expects that the cryptographic community will continue to analyze the AES through various conferences such as CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT, ASIACRYPT, and the Fast Software Encryption Workshop (FSE). Security and Maintenance of the AES 12.
