Speakers: Philipp Jovanovic, aumasson "Nearly all of the symmetric encryption modes you learned about in school, textbooks, and Wikipedia are (potentially) insecure." -- Matthew Green In recent history, we saw time and again (to some extent catastrophic) failures of cryptographic constructions for authenticated encryption (AE) due to bad design choices, implementation errors and a lack of reliable standards. After an introduction providing some background information on these topics, we present CAESAR, a new cryptographic competition which aims to find solutions to the problems mentioned above. In the second part of the talk, we introduce NORX, a new and next-generation AE scheme and our candidate for CAESAR.