The AES Winner Rijndael

NIST (U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology) set up an international competition with the goal to create a new symmetric encryption algorithm that should be come a new standard in the USA. The competition ended on 2 October 2000 when Norman Y. Mineta declared Rijndael as the new national standard.

So Rijndael is the winner of the three year competition where a number of the most well known cryptographers were involved. Mineta said "finally this standard will serve as a tool for security critical IT-applications and will be a vehicle for a quick growth of eCommerce. Rijndael will enable eCommerce and eGovernment and will create new opportunities for all Americans."

NIST organised and supervised the competition which was strongly influenced by the private sector. NIST asked for suggestions for new algorithms since 12 September 1997. A considerable number of organisations from every region of the world answered this call. As a requirement NIST postulated that the algorithm supports the key lengths 128, 192 and 256. For a 128 bit key there are approximately 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000=34*10^37 possible keys.

Rijndael was developed by the Belgian cryptographers Joan Daemen from Proton-Welt International and Vincent Rijmen, member of the Catholic University Leuven. Both of them are known as very experienced members of the crypto community.

After the final acceptance AES will be a publicly available patent free standard used to protect long-term data. It will substitute the DES-Algorithm (Data Encryption Standard) which was introduced in 1977.

Until recently cryptography was mainly used for governmental and military purposes. Nowadays millions of people use cryptography without even noticing. It is used for internet-shopping or with automatic teller machines (ATM).

DES and a variant (Triple-DES) is today widely used, even in the private sector. The new AES-Algorithm will be implicitly used by millions of consumers and virtually all companies and service providers.

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) became a US Federal standard on November 26, 2001 according to the document FIPS Publication 197.

At December 4, 2001 this was announced in a Federal Register Notice and in a press.

URLs for:

AES was developed to replace the Data Encryption Standard (DES) in a multi-year effort that began in 1997. The AES specifies a cryptographic algorithm that can be used to protect electronic data by encrypting (enciphering) and decrypting (deciphering) information. Details of the development process are available on the AES home page.

See also:

AES candidates

The Rijndael encryption algorithm

Visualization of AES using Flash