The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a specification for how electronic data should be encrypted that was published by the National Insitute for Standards in Technology (NIST) in the U.S. in 2001. It's today widely used as an encryption technique — most notably by the U.S. government.
AES is a form of symmetric key based encryption — in other words, it uses the same key to encrypt and decrypt data. It's also and is known as a block cipher. This means it splits a message into separate chunks and then encrypts these chunks into something called ciphertext (which can't be read).
This illustrated guide explores AES in detail. Covering everything from the history of its publication to how it's being applied. It also explains the algorithm at the center of AES and some of the math behind it, to give you a foundational understanding of this important technique in modern encryption.
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