Romania's Education Minister accused of having plagiarized three international research papers

Ioan Mang, Romania's Education Minister and a teacher of Information Technology, is accused of having plagiarized the works of some foreign authors, Eli Biham and Nathan Keller, Takeshi Shimoyama and Chu Hsin Lin, in three scientific papers. The first paper is called ''Cryptanalise Aspects on the Block Ciphers of RC5 and RC6", and Takeshi Shimoyama said that even though the headline differs, Mang's paper used the same algorithm, the dates and sentences as in the Japanese paper published in 2000.

A second paper where Mang is accused plagiarism is ''Public-Key Cryptosystem Based on the Diophantine Equations", which, according to accusations, includes paragraphs from a paper published by Taiwanese researchers. The third article "Square Attack Against Reduced Variants of Rijndael" is supposedly copied from a similar one by Eli Biham. Biham says Mang has even copied the mistakes in a manuscript version that was published by accident. This accusation comes soon after the first choice for the Education Minister, Corina Dumitrescu, was withdrawn just one day before the Parliament vote on the new Government, as some mistakes appeared in her CV and the media picked up the story. Mang, a member of the Social Democratic Party, already sworn in as Education Minister, is now accused on having used passages from the work of the two foreign authors in his own paper. Mang says the paper the media and the opposition refers to is not his. He commented on the paper, saying it includes some information from their scientific paper, on theoretical aspects of algorithms that cannot be modified. “The purpose of the paper was to implement these algorithms so as to show their strength and value. It is not about plagiarism, it is about the fear of some people who used to run this ministry had that they would lose control, and indeed they did lose it, ” said Ioan Mang. The first to mention Mang's alleged plagiarism was former prime Minister Emil Boc, head of the now opposition Democratic Liberal Party (PDL). editor@romania-insider.com (photo source: Presidency.ro)