Industry Expert Blogs

You’ve been sent on a mission to get some “AES encryption”, and after a quick look you find a multitude of expressions that contain AES. You may have found out that the acronym “AES” stands for Advanced Encryption Standard. You realize that it’s going to take more than a few minutes to find what you need. In fact, AES isn’t nearly enough information on the shopping list. This needs to be done hand-in-hand with more information about what’s available and what trade-off’s you can make, so you can hone in on the best solution for you.

First a little background. The American National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) www.nist.gov had a big contest to identify a successor to the venerable Data Encryption Standard (DES), which attracted candidate ciphers from around the world. The contest ended and a modified form of the cipher Rijndael was selected, and branded AES on November 26, 2001. AES was standardized as FIPS-197 (www.nist.gov/itl/upload/fips-197.pdf). FIPS is the American Federal Information Processing Standards. NIST also has a standard for the going-out-of-use DES, called FIPS 140-2.