Advanced Encryption Standard

The Advanced Encryption Standard is the title of the cipher chosen from among many candidates during a rigurous selection process hosted by the United States government to replace the Data Encryption Standard cipher, or the DES cipher. The Rijndael cpher (pronounced rain-doll) is the AES cipher.

History

The DES cipher was the United States of America's standard of cipher for many years for protecting non classified materials. As it was becoming more readily breakable, the government began a competition for a replacement cipher. After having failed miserably to convince the industry to accept their SkipJack cipher chip and Forteeza cipher algorithm, they concluded - and correctly so - that the only way that the industry would accept a government sanctioned cipher was to have the public openly explore any cipher candidate they wished and abide by their comments. Thus the AES competition was formed.

There were five contenders that made the finals, and of those Rijndael was the cipher algorithm of choice for its speed, size, and software flexibility. Today, the AES standard is based upon the Rijndael algorithm.

Today

The AES cipher used by The Hanalei Company is a C++ implementation that basically wraps a C implementation with a C++ class. The original C implementation was written by Christophe Devine. It is a FIPS-197 compliant AES implementation. In general, the cipher is used in CBC mode by products produced by The Hanalei Company . All AES source code is provided free under the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the license or a later version if you desire.

The original files are available for copy/paste or download at aes.h and aes.c. The derivative C++ source produced by The Hanalei Company is at eaes.h.