Synaptic Laboratories Limited today announced that it's hardware-dedicated cipher (Provisional) 'VEST' was accepted in the ECRYPT eSTREAM competition in the hardware stream cipher with associated authentication method division.  The VEST cipher was derived from our earlier research on the 'ACID' cipher.

The European Network of Excellence for Cryptology (ECRYPT) is a 4-year network of excellence funded within the Information Societies Technology (IST) Programme of the European Commission's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) under contract number IST-2002-507932. It falls under the action line Towards a global dependability and security framework. ECRYPT was launched on February 1st, 2004.

Its objective is to intensify the collaboration of European researchers in information security, and more in particular in cryptology and digital watermarking. The eSTREAM project manages and co-ordinates a multi-year effort to identify new stream ciphers suitable for widespread adoption as a de facto standard.

ECRYPT coordinates over 32 organisations including Ericsson AB (Sweden), France Telecom, Gemalto, IBM Research GmbH (Switzerland), MasterCard Europe sprl (Belgium), Vodafone Group Services Ltd (UK) and over 20 leading European universities.

About Synaptic Laboratories Limited

Synaptic Laboratories Limited is developing the next generation of secure communications protocols for global communications networks. Synaptic is guided by a vision of "Long term, high-assurance global data security for all stake-holders". Synaptic drives data security through the development of innovative security technologies founded on well studied cryptographic techniques. Synaptic can be found on the Web at http://synaptic-labs.com