Encryption

Description of AES

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is an encryption algorithm for securing sensitive but unclassified material by U.S. Government agencies and, as a likely consequence, may eventually become the de facto encryption standard for commercial transactions in the private sector. (Encryption for the US military and other classified communications is handled by separate, secret algorithms.) AES is a symmetric block cipher, operating on fixed-size blocks of data. The goal of AES was not only to select a new cipher algorithm but also to dramatically increase both the block and key size compared with DES. Where DES used 64-bit blocks, AES uses 128-bit blocks. Doubling the block size increases the number of possible blocks by a factor of 264, a dramatic advantage over DES.

History of the encryption method

AES, short for Advanced Encryption Standard, a symmetric 128-bit block data encryption technique developed by Belgian cryptographers Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen. The U.S government adopted the algorithm as its encryption technique in October 2000, replacing the DES encryption it used. AES works at multiple network layers simultaneously. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the U.S. Department of Commerce selected the algorithm, called Rijndael (pronounced Rhine Dahl or Rain Doll), out of a group of five algorithms under consideration, including one called MARS from a large research team at IBM. While the terms AES and Rijndael are used interchangeably, there are some differences between the two. AES has a fixed block size of 128-bits and a key size of 128, 192, or 256-bits, whereas Rijndael can be specified with any key and block sizes in a multiple of 32-bits, with a minimum of 128-bits and a maximum of 256-bits.

Advantages of AES encryption

1. This type of encryption is easy to carry out. All users have to do is specify and share the secret key and then begin to encrypt and decrypt messages.

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