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What is AES encryption and how does it work?
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When it comes to cyber security,

AES is one of those acronyms
that you see popping up
everywhere. That’s because it
has become the global standard
of encryption and it is used to
keep a significant amount of our
communications safe
Continue………

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a fast

and secure form of encryption that keeps prying
eyes away from our data. We see it in messaging
apps like WhatsApp and Signal, programs
like VeraCrypt and WinZip, in a range of hardware
and a variety of other technologies that we use all
of the time
 Why was AES developed?

Why was AES developed?

The earliest types of encryption were simple, using techniques

like changing each letter in a sentence to the one that comes
after it in the alphabet. Under this kind of code, the previous
sentence becomes:
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As people got better at cracking codes, the
encryption had to become more
sophisticated so that the messages could
be kept secret. This arms race of coming up
with more sophisticated methods while
others poured their efforts into breaking
them led to increasingly complicated
techniques, such as the Enigma machine.
Its earliest designs can be traced back to
a patent from the German inventor Arthur
Scherbius in 1918
 The rise of electronic communication has also
been a boon for encryption. In the 1970s, the US
National Bureau of Standards (NBS) began
searching for a standard means that could be
used to encrypt sensitive government
information. The result of their search was to
adopt a symmetric key algorithm developed at
IBM, which is now called the Data Encryption
Standard (DES). The DES served its purpose
relatively well for the next couple of decades, but
in the nineties, some security concerns began to
pop up.
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The DES only has a 56-bit
key (compared to the maximum of
256-bit in AES, but we’ll get to that
later), so as technology and cracking
methods improved, attacks against it
started to become more practical. The
first DES encrypted message to be
broken open was in 1997, by
the DESCHALL Project in an RSA
Security-sponsored competition.
 The next year, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation (EFF) built a
DES cracker which could brute
force a key in just over two days.
In 1999, the EFF and the internet’s
first computing
collective, distributed.net,
collaborated to get that time down
to under 24 hours
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Although these attacks were costly

and impractical to mount, they
began to show that the DES’s reign
as the go-to encryption standard was
coming to an end. With computing
power exponentially
increasing according to Moore’s law,
it was only a matter of time until the
DES could no longer be relied on
Continue…..

The US government set out on a five

year mission to evaluate a variety of
different encryption methods in
order to find a new standard that
would be secure. The National
Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST) announced that it
had finally made its selection in late
2001.
Continue….

Their choice was a specific subset of

the Rijndael block cipher, with a fixed
block-size of 128-bits and key sizes of 128,
192 and 256-bits. It was developed by
Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, two
cryptographers from Belgium. In May of
2002, AES was approved to become
the US federal standard and quickly
became the standard encryption
algorithm for the rest of the world as well
Why was this cipher chosen for AES?
With any kind of encryption, there are
always trade-offs. You could easily have a
standard that was exponentially more
secure than AES, but it would take too
long to encrypt and decrypt to be of any
practical use. In the end, the Rijndael
block cipher was chosen by NIST for its
all-around abilities, including its
performance on both hardware and
software, ease of implementation and its
level of security
How does AES work?

Be aware that the following example

is a simplification, but it gives you a
general idea of how AES works.
Unfortunately, there isn’t enough
coffee in the world to make most
people want to get through the more
complicated aspects of AES. Normally,
the process is performed in binary
and there’s a lot more maths.
Steps to be followed in AES
 AES
• Plaint text =AES USES A MATRIX

A S M I
E E A X
S S T Z
U A R Z
 First, the data is divided into blocks.

• Under this method of encryption, the first thing that happens is that your plaintext (which is
the information that you want to be encrypted) is separated into blocks. The block size of AES is
128-bits, so it separates the data into a four-by-four column of sixteen bytes (there are eight
bits in a byte and 16 x 8 = 128).

• If your message was “buy me some potato chips please” the first block looks like this:

• b m o p
• u e m o
• y e t
• s a
• We’ll skip the rest of the message for this example and just focus on what happens to the first
block as it is encrypted. The “…to chips please” would normally just be added to the next block
 Key expansion

• Key expansion involves taking the initial key and using it to come up with
a series of other keys for each round of the encryption process. These
new 128-bit round keys are derived with Rijndael’s key schedule, which is
essentially a simple and fast way to produce new key ciphers. If the initial
key was “keys are boring1”:
k i

e a b n

y r o g

s e r 1
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• Then each of the new keys might look something like this once
Rijndael’s key schedule has been used:

• 14 29 1h s5
• h9 9f st 9f
• gt 2h hq 73
• ks dj df hb
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Although they look like random
characters (and the above
example is just made up) each
of these keys is derived from a
structured process when AES
encryption is actually applied.
We’ll come back to what these
round keys are used for later on.
 Add round key

• In this step, because it is the first round, our initial key is added to the
block of our message:

•+
Substitute bytes
Shift rows
Mix columns
• Many more rounds…
• If you thought that was it, we’re not even close. After the last round
key was added, it goes back to the byte substitution stage, where
each value is changed according to a predetermined table. Once
that’s done, it’s back to shift rows and moving each row to the left by
one, two or three spaces. Then it goes through the mix columns
equation again. After that, another round key is added
To make things clearer, the entire AES encryption process goes:

the entire • Key expansion

• Add round key
AES
encryption •
•
Byte substitution
Shift rows
process •
•
Mix columns
Add round key
goes:
x 9, 11 or 13 times,
depending on whether the
key is 128, 192 or 256-bit
 Byte
substitution

Shift rows

Add round
key
Once the data has gone through this complex process, your
original “buy me some potato chips please” comes out
looking something like “ok23b8a0i3j 293uivnfqf98vs87a”. It
seems like a completely random string of characters, but as
you can see from these examples, it is actually the result of
many different mathematical operations being applied to it
again and again.
AES security issues
Cryptographers are constantly probing AES
for weaknesses, trying to come up with new
techniques and harnessing the technology
that comes their way. This is essential,
because if it wasn’t being thoroughly tested
by academics, then criminals or nation states
could eventually find a way to crack it
without the rest of the world knowing. So
far, researchers have only uncovered
theoretical breaks and side channel attacks.
Why do we need encryption?

Why do we need encryption?

Now that we’ve gone through the technical details of AES, it’s important to
discuss why encryption is important. At its most basic level, encryption allows us
to encode information so that only those who have access to the key can decrypt
the data. Without the key, it looks like gibberish. With the key, the jumble of
seemingly random characters turns back into its original message.