Abstract: The NESSIE project is a three-year project with the main objective to put forward a portfolio of strong cryptographic primitives of various types. We have forcused on the three block ciphers selected most recently. We study their mechanisms, performance and design principles and compare the security against the well-known cryptanalsis. It is pointed out that MISTY1 and Camellia are secure against the differential and linear cryptanalysis and can also withdraw the interpolation attacks, slide attacks and related-key attacks. But they can both be described with a set of multivariate quadratic or linear equations and this may form a potential algebraic weakness. The security analysis of SHACAL-2 will likely lead to a new methodology of cryptanalysis of block ciphers. We believe that the NESSIE project will help to promote the standardization of our own cryptographic primitives.

Key words: NESSIE project, block cipher, MISTY1, Camellia, SHACAL-2