AES Full Form

AES stands for Advanced Encryption Standard and is a majorly used symmetric encryption algorithm. It is mainly used for encryption and protection of electronic data. It was used as the replacement of DES(Data encryption standard) as it is much faster and better than DES. AES consists of three block ciphers and these ciphers are used to provide encryption of data.

History

AES was developed by NIST(National Institute of Standards and Technology) in 1997. It was developed for replacing DES which was slow and was vulnerable to various attacks. So, therefore, a new encryption algorithm was made to overcome the shortcomings of DES. AES was then published on 26th November 2001.

Characteristics

• AES has keys of three lengths which are of 128, 192, 256 bits.
• It is flexible and has implementation for software and hardware.
• It provides high security and can prevent many attacks.
• It doesn’t have any copyright so it can be easily used globally.
• It consists of 10 rounds of processing for 128 bit keys.

Advantages

• It can be implemented on both hardware and software.
• It provides high security to the users.
• It provides one of the best open source solutions for encryption.
• It is a very robust algorithm.

Disadvantages

• It requires many rounds for encryption.
• It is hard to implement on software.
• It needs much processing at different stages.
• It is difficult to implement when performance has to be considered.