Internet Communication

7 Pages 1855 Words

ntional cryptosystem, was the first widely known secure conventional system to be approved and put into place. The controversy began when DES was introduced. The NSA required that IBM make two changes to the new standard. Instead of a 128-bit key, NSA wanted DES to have a 56-bit key so that the government was able to decipher the information upon demand. Up until recently, DES was unbreakable, however, with the increase in technology, DES was broken and is now being replaced by other conventional systems.
AES is a standard from the National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) that was developed to replace DES. NIST held a challenge for researchers to submit algorithms that would be chosen to become AES. The winner of this challenge is called Rijndael and was designed by J. Daemen and V. Rijnmen. Rijndael is a symmetric cryptosystem using 128-bit, 196-bit and 256-bit input and keys. “NIST chose Rijndael because it combines simplicity and high performance.” (Smith, 2001) This will be the algorithm I will be focusing on for the remainder of this paper.
The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) was enacted in May, 2002 and specifies a Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) approved cryptographic algorithm that can be used to protect electronic data. The AES algorithm can be explained as a symmetric block cipher that can encrypt (encipher) and decrypt (decipher) information. As indicated earlier, encryption converts data to an unintelligible form called ...