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Advanced Encryption Standard
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Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is the latest encryption standard used to protect confidential information like financial data for government and commercial use. It is a stronger symmetric encryption algorithm that was approved by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) to replace the Data Encryption Standard (DES) and Triple DES encryption algorithm. DES is arguably the most important and widely used cryptographic algorithm in the world. However, its usefulness is now quite limited after years of advances in computational technology. A DES key can now be easily cracked after several hours of number crunching. By using dedicated hardware, Electronic Frontier Foundation manages to break it in 22 hours (http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/des3/).
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The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)... known as Rijndael, is a block cipher adopted as an encryption standard by the U.S. government. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) established the new Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) specification on May 26, 2002. AES is a new cryptographic algorithm that can be used to protect electronic data. Specifically, AES is an iterative, symmetric-key block cipher that can use keys of 128, 192, and 256 bits, and encrypts and decrypts data in blocks of 128 bits (16 bytes).
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In cryptography, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)... known as Rijndael, is a block cipher adopted as an encryption standard by the U.S. government. It has been analyzed extensively and is now used worldwide, as was the case with its predecessor,[3] the Data Encryption Standard (DES). AES was announced by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as U.S. FIPS PUB 197 (FIPS 197) on November 26, 2001 after a 5-year standardization process (see Advanced Encryption Standard process for more details). It became effective as a standard May 26, 2002. As of 2006, AES is one of the most popular algorithms used in symmetric key cryptography. It is available by choice in many different encryption packages.
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Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) provides very high security with relatively low processing requirements. With these two key properties, AES not only replaces old DES based products but it opens up many new markets that require higher security but are limited by processing bandwidth. New protocols such as CCMP and DTCP are just "wrappers" of AES making a software solution with an AES hardware core the most practical implementation.
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After a three-year competition, the AES was announced by NIST as an approved encryption technique for use by the U.S. government, private businesses, and individuals. When properly implemented as a key component of an overall security protocol, the AES permits a very high degree of cryptographic security, yet is fast and efficient in operation.
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It is only a question of time before AES encryption becomes widely available from Microsoft and third-party vendors in the form of .NET Framework libraries. However, having this code in your skill set will remain valuable for a number of reasons. This implementation is particularly simple and will have low resource overhead. In addition, access to and an understanding of the source code will enable you to customize the AES class and use any implementation of it more effectively.
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Advanced Encryption Standard