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AES stands for
Advanced Encryption Standard. AES is
a symmetric key encryption technique
which will replace the commonly used
Data Encryption Standard (DES).
It was the result of a worldwide
call for submissions of encryption
algorithms issued by the US
Government's
National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST) in 1997 and
completed in 2000.
The winning algorithm, Rijndael, was
developed by two Belgian
cryptologists, Vincent Rijmen and
Joan Daemen.
AES provides
strong encryption and has been
selected by NIST as a Federal
Information Processing Standard in
November 2001 (FIPS-197),
and in June 2003 the U.S. Government
(NSA)
announced that
AES is secure
enough to protect classified
information up to the TOP SECRET
level, which is the highest
security level and defined as
information which would cause
"exceptionally grave damage" to
national security if disclosed to
the public.
The AES
algorithm uses one of three cipher
key strengths: a 128, 192, or
256 bit encryption key (password).
Each encryption key size causes the
algorithm to behave slightly
differently, so the increasing key
sizes not only offer a larger number
of bits with which you can scramble
the data, but also increase the
complexity of the cipher algorithm.
(see also a detailed explanation on
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