AES Full Form

What Is The Full Form Of AES?

The full form of AES is Advanced Encryption Standard.

AES is a specification used to encrypt and protect electronic data. It is a symmetric encryption algorithm. It is used majorly as a replacement for the Data Encryption Standard (DES). The AES has three block ciphers that provide data encryption- making AES better and faster than DES. The US government adopted this specification. The algorithm that AES describes is a symmetric-key one. It means that the same key works for both decrypting and encrypting the data.

History of AES

• The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed AES in 1997.
• AES initially aimed at replacing the DES (Data Encryption Standard) since the specification was slow and vulnerable to attacks.
• Thus, a new encryption algorithm- the AES, came into existence to overcome these shortcomings of DES.
• The AES encryption algorithm was finally published on 26 November 2001.

Characteristics of AES

• The AES has three lengths of keys. These are 128, 192, 256 bits in length.
• It prevents many attacks because the security provided is very high.
• AES is highly flexible.
• It has implementations for both hardware and software.
• One can easily use it globally as it doesn’t have a copyright.
• It involves a 10 rounds processing for the 128-bit keys.

Number of Rounds in AES

In an AES cipher, the key size used specifies the total number of transformation rounds required to convert the input (also called the plaintext) to the final output (known as the ciphertext). Here are the number of rounds:

• 256-bit keys – 14 rounds
• 192-bit keys – 12 rounds
• 128-bit keys – 10 rounds

Every round contains several steps of processing. It also includes the one that depends on the encryption key itself. For transforming the ciphertext back to its original plaintext, one can apply a set of reverse rounds with the same encryption key.

Advantages of AES

• A user can implement this standard on both software and hardware.
• The security provided is high for all the users.
• AES involves a robust algorithm.
• It offers one of the best solutions (open source) for encryption.

Disadvantages of AES

• It is not very easy to implement on the software.
• The standard requires various rounds of processing.
• AES requires more processing at every step.
• AES becomes tricky to implement when considering the performance.

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