An influential European Union board has approved two types of ciphers developed by Mitsubishi Electric Corp. as "highly practical and strong cryptographic algorithms," the electronics company said Thursday.

The EU board, a group of researchers under the New European Schemes for Signatures, Integrity and Encryption (NESSIE), endorsed the two ciphers -- the 64-bit block cipher MISTY 1 and the 128-bit block cipher Camellia, the company said.

NESSIE is a three-year project funded by the European Commission and organized by European researchers of cryptography. The project was launched in 2000.

The project is designed to build a universal industrywide consensus for future use of excellent encryption and decryption technologies, which may be useful for e-commerce.

The main objective of the NESSIE project is to select and promote a group of strong cryptographic technologies through a transparent evaluation process organized by researchers from the governments of seven developed countries and major global electronics companies.

"As a result of these technical evaluations, the NESSIE board reached the conclusion that both the MISTY 1 and Camellia are excellent ciphers in terms of security and practicality," the company said in a statement.

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. researchers also joined in the developmental process of Camellia, the firm said.

MISTY 1 was the only cipher the EU board selected in the 64-bit block cipher category and Camellia was selected in the 128-bit block cipher category as well as AES, a current U.S. governmental standard, it said.

In 2000, another of the company's ciphers, a variant of MISTY dubbed KASUMI, was adopted as the mandatory standard for the third-generation mobile phone communications system, called W-CDMA.

Earlier, the Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications Ministry and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry officially approved MISTY 1 and Camellia for Japanese government use.