----- Original Message -----
From: "Francis DeLaMaza" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> BTW, what is AES?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Francis DeLaMaza" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Any disadvantages to AES? Who is
> developing it? Opensource?
AES is the soon to be government standard titled "Advanced Encryption
Algorithm", it has become commonplace to use the term AES to refer to a
cipher that is actually names Rijndael. The name change will only be
complete after the FIPS is published. It is a 128-bit block cipher,
supporting keys of 128/192/256 bits. Because the cipher is Rijndael it also
supports block and key sizes that are any multiple of 32-bits, but only
128x128/192/256 will be the official standard.
Originally created in Europe for the AES competition, by Joan Daemen and
Vincent Rijmen. Rijndael benefits a large body of attack knowledge from
Square. And the specification can be found from
http://csrc.nist.gov/encryption/aes/rijndael/ along with a significant body
of information.
As with any recent cipher it's security is in question. However Rijndael has
survived 2+ years of intense public scrutiny, of the final 5 it was chosen
because it was fastest. The other 4 were MARS, Twofish, RC6, and Serpent.
General concensus was that the only real competitors were Twofish, Serpent,
and Rijndael. Of these Rijndael was universally fast, and the most well
balanced cipher. However of the 3 that were identified as real competitors,
Rijndael has the smallest security margin, and is believed to be the
weakest. This makes no difference because with all 3 contending finalists,
in fact with all the finalists there are no attacks better than brute-force
known. In spite of this it is worth noting that during the final AES
conference the developers for each algorithm were asked barring their own
cipher which cipher they would like to see as AES. With the obvious
exception of the Rijndael team every team stated they would like to see
Rijndael crowned.
Joe
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