What Is AES (Advanced Encryption Standard)?

Cryptography Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Introduction to AES (Advanced Encryption Standard)

∟What Is AES (Advanced Encryption Standard)?

A quick description of the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) cipher is provided. AES is based on the Rijndael cipher and uses a substitution-permutation network, not a Feistel network. AES is more secure and faster than DES.

What Is AES (Advanced Encryption Standard)? The AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001, see the FIPS PUB 197 (Federal Information Processing Standards Publication 197): "Announcing the ADVANCED ENCRYPTION STANDARD (AES)" at http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/fips197/fips-197.pdf.

AES has been adopted by the US government and is now used worldwide. It supersedes the Data Encryption Standard (DES), which was published in 1977 by the US government in FIPS PUB 46.

AES is based on the Rijndael cipher developed by two Belgian cryptographers, Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, who submitted a proposal to NIST during the AES selection process. Rijndael cipher is a family of ciphers with different key and block sizes. But AES only selected 3 ciphers with 1 block size of 128 bits and 3 key lengths: 128, 192 and 256 bits:

AES-128 - AES with a 128-bit key.
AES-196 - AES with a 196-bit key.
AES-256 - AES with a 256-bit key.

Unlike its predecessor DES (Data Encryption Standard), AES (or Rijndael) cipher uses a substitution-permutation network, not a Feistel network, see the next tutorial for more details.