Cryptography for the Everyday Developer: Understanding AES - The Advanced Encryption Standard
This is an article in a series on Cryptography for the Everyday Developer. Follow along to learn the basics of modern cryptography and encryption. Last time we explored the Data Encryption Standard (DES), and how its Feistel network structure worked. We also saw why DES eventually became obsolete: its 56-bit key size was simply too small in the face of modern computing power. To replace DES, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) held a public competition in the late 1990s. Fifteen different algorithms were submitted from around the world. Over the course of several years, this field was narrowed down to five finalists, each carefully analyzed by cryptographers. Finally, in 2000, an algorithm called Rijndael, created by two Belgian cryptographers, Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, was selected as the winner. This became the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), which has since become the most widely used block cipher in the world. It is used everywhere: encrypting TLS traffic in your browser, securing Wi-Fi connections, and protecting classified government data. ...