What is AES?
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), also known as Rijndael, is a block cipher adopted as an encryption standard by the U.S. government. AES is a symmetric-key algorithm that was designed to replace its outdated predecessor DES (Data Encryption Standard). This algorithm appeared as a result of the public competition announced by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 1997 and finished in 2000. Five different algorithms got into the second tour of the competition and Rijndael was announced the winner. The algorithm was chosen due to such features as security, performance rate, effectiveness, easy implementation on various software and hardware platforms and, of course, flexibility. Rijndael remained fast on a wide range of software and hardware in all available modes. Rijndael has a perfect key initialization time and requires minimum memory. As of 2006, Rijndael is one of the most popular symmetric-key encryption algorithms. This algorithm was developed by two Belg
As of May 26, 2002, the new standard used by the U.S. government for protecting sensitive, but not classified, data is AES (Advanced Encryption Standard). This new standard was the result of a “best of breed” approach in which multiple encryption algorithm (MARS, RC6, Rijndael, Serpent, and Twofish) were submitted and evaluated on the basis of not only brute protection, but also speed, maintenance, and administration. As a result of this process, the Rijndael algorithm was selected to be the official algorithm of the new standard. Rijndael (as implemented in AES) is a symmetric block cipher that uses 128-, 192-, and 256-bit keys (in blocks of 128 bits). Although all the algorithms submitted to the government were considered strong enough for AES, Rijndael excelled in areas of performance, efficiency, and flexibility. These areas take on additional importance when you understand that the protocol has to be implemented in hardware/software combinations with less power than traditional de
