NESSIE (New European Schemes for Signatures, Integrity and Encryption) was a European research project funded from 2000 to 2003 to identify secure cryptographic primitives. The project was comparable to the NIST AES process and the Japanese Government-sponsored CRYPTREC project, but differed from both in several respects. In particular, there is both overlap and disagreement between the selections and recommendations from NESSIE and CRYPTREC (as of the August 2003 draft report). The NESSIE participants included prominent cryptographers from major European research institutions, as did the CRYPTREC project.

NESSIE was intended to identify and evaluate quality cryptographic designs in several categories, and to that end issued a public call for submissions in March 2000. Forty submissions were received,

Further reading

  • NESSIE project homepage (archived October 2007)