The Open Source Community OpenSSL Project Adopts the Next Generation International Standard Cipher 'Camellia', Developed in Japan

JCN Newswires, Nov 8, 2006

Tokyo, Japan, Nov 8, 2006 - (JCN Newswire) - The OpenSSL Project, an international open source community, adopted "Camellia," a 128-bit block cipher(1) algorithm jointly developed in 2000 by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation ('NTT') and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation ('Mitsubishi'), into its OpenSSL toolkit for use in the development of SSL/TLS(2) protocol.

To support a secure advanced information society, and with the goal of disseminating Camellia, which was selected as a major international standard and recommended cipher, NTT released Camellia source codes as open source on April 13, 2006 so that Camellia can be freely used as an international basic technology. NTT has also provided its source codes to open source communities.

As a result, in September of this year Camellia was incorporated into OpenSSL version 0.9.8c.

The adoption of Camellia into the OpenSSL toolkit means that Camellia provides security and performance equivalent to the US government standard cipher AES(3) and is the world's only alternative to AES. From now on, since the OpenSSL toolkit equipped with Camellia will be installed into WWW servers worldwide and used as a world leading open cryptographic toolkit, we anticipate that Camellia will be spread even further through its use and commercialization on a global scale.

Camellia Website: http://info.isl.ntt.co.jp/crypt/eng/camellia/index.html

Information related to open source: http://info.isl.ntt.co.jp/crypt/eng/camellia/source.html

OpenSSL Project Website: http://www.openssl.org/

Background and Significance of Adoption into OpenSSL

Camellia, the next generation encryption algorithm that provides the world's highest security and performance, is an international standard and recommended cipher. Camellia was selected into the first ISO/IEC international standard cipher(4), EU (NESSIE) recommended cipher(5), and Japanese e-government recommended cipher(6), and is internationally recognized as the de facto representative of Japanese encryption algorithm. Furthermore, Camellia was adopted as the IETF standard track RFC(7) encryption algorithm in mainstream Internet encryption communications protocols such as SSL/TLS, IPsec, S/MIME, and XML.

NTT released free of charge the source codes (C language and Java) as open source and is providing an environment in which any Camellia users can use the Camellia essential patents at no charge without concluding the royalty-free licensing agreement so that more people can benefit from the merits of Camellia, which are highly evaluated worldwide. Furthermore, NTT is providing the Camellia source codes to open source communities and undertaking continuous activities for adoption.

The OpenSSL toolkit has three types of functionality: SSL/TLS de facto stack, encryption engine, and PKI application development toolkit.

Many current standard ciphers, such as Triple DES and RC4, are available in it as engines for symmetric key encryption, but only AES has been supported as the next generation encryption algorithm in OpenSSL version 0.9.7 and later. This time since Camellia will be equipped in OpenSSL version 0.9.8c and later, an environment* is available in which multiple ciphers can be used as next generation encryption algorithms, and we believe that this will contribute to the actualization of more secure advanced information society.

Currently, more than 60% of the WWW servers worldwide have the OpenSSL toolkit installed, and in the future Camellia will be sequentially installed into these servers. Since the OpenSSL toolkit is used in various commercial developments and the selection of Camellia can be made easily, we anticipate that the use and commercial development of Camellia will accelerate.

Significance of Disclosing Specifications and Releasing Camellia as Open Source

From the beginning, the specification for Camellia was publicly disclosed, and cryptographic researchers worldwide have already evaluated the security and performance of the algorithm a great many times. The evaluation results were published in reports and presented at international cryptographic conferences, etc. These form the technical basis for the reputation of Camellia as one of the world's most excellent encryption algorithm and provide the rationale behind its selection as the internationally standardized and recommended specifications.

In the future, since the open source code of Camellia incorporated in the OpenSSL toolkit will be distributed worldwide, engineers around the world will evaluate, improve, and implement Camellia codes as part of implementation process. We anticipate that it will become easier to use Camellia.

Although, for practical products, vulnerability in the implementation could be a threat to the reliability and security, engineers worldwide will inspect the implementation by disclosing the encryption engine as open source in the same way as the algorithm is disclosed. Therefore we anticipate that the security based on that implementation will improve as a result.