New Block Encryption

ray jones writes "Bruce Schneier's company, Counterpane Systems, has released a description and source code for a new block encryption algorithm, Twofish. Twofish is their submission to the NIST's Advanced Encryption Standard process. Twofish is unpatented/uncopyrighted, much like its predecessor, Blowfish. Crypto is an area that's long used a model similar to open source to ensure that ciphers are safe. Ciphers developed in secret (such as Skipjack) are considered unreliable by default."