Rijndael, named after its Belgian creators, was chosen in 2000 by NIST to become AES, replacing DES. It is a block cipher used for secure data transmission and has become a global standard. Its security is debated among experts.
The word Rijndael was created by combining parts of the surnames of Vincent Rijmen and Joan Daemen, both Belgians, to create a name for the algorithm they developed in response to a 1997 invitation from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to send an advanced algorithm. Twenty-one teams from 11 different countries submitted submissions, and after the list was narrowed down to five finalists, Rijndael – pronounced /RINE dahl/ or /RAIN dahl/ – was selected in 2000 to form the basis of the then Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).
AES, sometimes referred to as “AES (Rijndael).” It was created to replace the Data Encryption Standard (DES) and to be more secure. It is also used as a privacy transform in Internet Protocol Security (IPSec), as well as Internet Key Exchange (IKE). IKE uses public key cryptography to securely transmit the secret key for decryption.
The US government has adopted AES for sensitive, but unclassified documents, making it a Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS), in this case, number 197. In 2003, the National Security Agency (NSA) approved AES using 192-e 256-bit keys also for top secret documents, and the European consortium NESSIE (New European Schemes for Signatures, Integrity, and Encryption) recommended it in the same year. In a sense, therefore, it has become a global standard.
The Belgian critologists who created Rijndael developed it from an earlier collaboration called Square. Rijndael is a block cipher, which means that the cryptographic key and algorithm are applied to the data in a block rather than individual bits. It is an alternative to a stream cipher. The cipher handles data in 128-bit blocks and supports 128-, 156-, and 192-bit keys.
Crypto experts differ on whether Rijndael was the best choice for AES. Some say that no algorithm would satisfy everyone. There are ongoing attacks on AES, as well as many people working to attack block ciphers as a class. There are also bets as to whether AES is completely secure on the one hand, or whether it will be broken within some specified dates.
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