Advanced Encryption Standard
lastmod 2018-08-17created 2015-11-291 edits
The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is an encryption scheme established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001. AES is based on the Rijndael ([rɛindaːl]) cipher, developed by two Belgian cryptographers, Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, and was selected through the AES competition.
Since its adoption by the U.S. government, AES has been widely used around the world. AES, which replaced DES published in 1977, is a symmetric-key algorithm that uses the same key for both encryption and decryption.
NIST announced AES as U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard FIPS-197 on November 26, 2001. NIST went through a five-year standardization process in which 15 algorithms competed, and the Rijndael cipher was selected as the most suitable algorithm. The standard took effect on May 26, 2002. AES is included in the ISO/IEC 18033-3 standard and is used in many encryption packages. AES is also the first publicly available algorithm approved by the U.S. National Security Agency for use with Top Secret information.
Rijndael is named after the algorithm's developers, Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, and the AES standard refers to the Rijndael algorithm with a block size of 128 bits among the several Rijndael algorithms.