Mastering AES: A Deep Dive Into the Advanced Encryption Standard
Abstract
AES stands for Advanced Encryption Standard, and it serves as the most popular symmetric encryption algorithm to date. The term ‘symmetric’ implies that the same key encrypts and decrypts; this is an important detail for the design and implementation of the algorithm. Encryption is crucial in today’s world since it plays an essential role in everyday life. Wi-Fi, Online Banking, and many more, all rely on encryption to keep them secure. Some of the more technical processes that AES typically works with include HTTPS and SSL/TLS protocols, since they handle the authenticity and data integrity part of digital certificates and signatures, as well as IPSEC and secure wireless protocols. In general, AES is known as a block cipher, ‘cipher’ meaning the algorithm used to encrypt or decrypt a given message, since it takes in blocks of 16 bytes and encrypts each block. For this project, we consider the famous Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and analyze its fundamental structure and the properties that make it work, which borrow from various theoretical Mathematical concepts such as Galois Fields, Prime Factorization, and Matrix Theory. Moreover, we go further in our approach by trying to implement the encryption scheme ourselves using the programming languages C and C++. We extend our analysis to the decryption process of AES, as well as the technical design and attributes such as the padding, key length, and number of rounds. Alongside our analysis, we also compare AES to other popular encryption schemes such as the RSA Algorithm and DES.
Faculty Sponsors
Dr. Wei Li
Project Type
Event
Location
Alvin Sherman Library
Start Date
4-5-2023 12:00 PM
End Date
4-6-2023 4:00 PM
Mastering AES: A Deep Dive Into the Advanced Encryption Standard
Alvin Sherman Library
AES stands for Advanced Encryption Standard, and it serves as the most popular symmetric encryption algorithm to date. The term ‘symmetric’ implies that the same key encrypts and decrypts; this is an important detail for the design and implementation of the algorithm. Encryption is crucial in today’s world since it plays an essential role in everyday life. Wi-Fi, Online Banking, and many more, all rely on encryption to keep them secure. Some of the more technical processes that AES typically works with include HTTPS and SSL/TLS protocols, since they handle the authenticity and data integrity part of digital certificates and signatures, as well as IPSEC and secure wireless protocols. In general, AES is known as a block cipher, ‘cipher’ meaning the algorithm used to encrypt or decrypt a given message, since it takes in blocks of 16 bytes and encrypts each block. For this project, we consider the famous Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and analyze its fundamental structure and the properties that make it work, which borrow from various theoretical Mathematical concepts such as Galois Fields, Prime Factorization, and Matrix Theory. Moreover, we go further in our approach by trying to implement the encryption scheme ourselves using the programming languages C and C++. We extend our analysis to the decryption process of AES, as well as the technical design and attributes such as the padding, key length, and number of rounds. Alongside our analysis, we also compare AES to other popular encryption schemes such as the RSA Algorithm and DES.
