What is AES Encryption?
AES stands for Advanced Encryption Standard. AES is a symmetric key encryption technique which will replace the commonly used Data Encryption Standard (DES). It was the result of a worldwide call for submissions of encryption algorithms issued by the US Government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 1997 and completed in 2000. The winning algorithm, Rijndael, was developed by two Belgian cryptologists, Vincent Rijmen and Joan Daemen. AES provides strong encryption and has been selected by NIST as a Federal Information Processing Standard in November 2001 (FIPS-197), and in June 2003 the U.S. Government (NSA) announced that AES is secure enough to protect classified information up to the TOP SECRET level, which is the highest security level and defined as information which would cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security if disclosed to the public. The AES algorithm uses one of three cipher key strengths: a 128, 192, or 256 bit encryption key (passwor
