AES, Advanced Encryption Standard

Also known as Rijndael, the Advanced Encryption Standard has been adopted by the United States government as the standard method in securing critical data. AES was considered as an FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) in November of 2001, and became effective in May of 2002. It is currently one of the most widely used algorithms in cryptography and comes available in many different packages. AES encrypts using key lengths in 128, 192, and 256-bits. Rijndael is a unique combination of the names of it’s developers, Vincent Rijmen and Joan Daemen. Unlike it’s predecessor, DES (Data Encryption Standard), AES is a substitution-permutation network opposed to a Feistel network. This enables it to work fast in various software programs and hardware devices. It is fairly simple to implement and calls for little system memory. Being standardized as the latest in encryption technology, AES is now being applied on a rather large scale.