Who’s Who in AES

Encryption is an age-old method of scrambling information in such a way that only the originator and intended recipients have the ability to return the information back to its original format. Its main purpose is to prevent valuable information from falling into the wrong hands and possibly causing irreparable damage. An example of a simple type of encryption used against me involves a different language. A friend of mine is bilingual, speaking both English and Spanish fluently. When I visit his home and his family is present, he speaks Spanish to his family in certain conversations and English in others. Knowing that I don't speak or understand Spanish, the Spanish conversations are encrypted and that information remains private among the family. The main goal in designing any encryption algorithm is security. There are several encryption methods in use today using various algorithms depending on the information being protected. Some are used to protect unclassified but sensitive data and other secret algorithms are used to protect the most highly classified data. This paper is going to introduce the new Advanced Encryption Standard, or AES, the winning algorithm, its competitors, the specifications set forth, and decision making process of NIST. The new planned Federal Information Processing Standard cryptographic algorithm to be implemented by the United States Government is AES, or Advanced Encryption Standard. The algorithm selected is Rijndael developed by Belgium cryptographers Dr. Joan Daemen and Dr. Vincent Rijmen. The Rijndael / AES marriage marks a four year effort in developing the next accepted standard of encryption to be implemented in government organizations. It will be used domestically and internationally in both the federal and private sectors. AES is set to replace DES, which has been in use for over twenty years and was cracked in less than 24 hours at a cracking contest in 1999. Single DES is also being eliminated and is currently only used in Legacy systems. The one algorithm that's not expected to be phased out anytime soon is Triple DES. Triple DES uses DES to encrypt data three times. The first key encrypts data the first time; the second key encrypts the data a second time, and the first key is used again to encrypt the data a third time. Though Triple DES is expected to remain in use for some time, problems are clearly visible for the future. Having to encrypt data three times before transmitting …