The last word on FPE?

There's an interesting paper by Mihir Bellare, Thomas Ristenpart, Phillip Rogaway and Till Stegers that's available on the IACR ePrint archive. This paper has the unassuming title "Format-Preserving Encryption," but it seems to have a fairly complete and definitive discussion of how to encrypt in an efficient and secure way that maps a plaintext into a ciphertext of identical format.

This is not a paper for casual readers because it talks about FPE at a level that's probably accessible only to cryptographers. But if you're interested in the details of the technical challenges that you need to address to make efficient and secure FPE schemes, it's probably the best paper to read.

Interestingly, Rogaway's work on this paper was supported by a grant from the NSF that's part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. In other words, it's part of the US government's massive economic stimulus program. Apparently the government sees FPE as being a technology that's important to the future of the US economy.