AES stands for "Advanced Encryption Standard" and is one of the symmetric key cryptographic schemes. It is a standard encryption scheme established by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the U.S. Department of Commerce and is the successor to the Data Encryption Standard (DES), the standard encryption scheme adopted in 1977.In September 1997, NIST conducted a worldwide open call for applications, and selected 15 schemes that met the requirements of the open call from among 21 submitted schemes. The scheme called "Rijndael" developed by the Belgian cryptographic developers Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen was adopted in October 2000. It became AES and was published as "FIPS PUB 197" in March 2001.
AES is a type of "block cipher" in which data of a specific length (block) is processed as a unit. The encryption algorithm is relatively simple, repeating bit-by-bit/byte substitutions, shift operations, and remainder operations, etc., and requires fewer resources for calculations. In addition, the algorithm is processed in 8-bit units, compared to DES, which processes in 4-bit units, and requires fewer repetitions, making it possible to process the same length of data faster than DES.
AES is also used in the New European Schemes for Signatures, Integrity and Encryption (NESSIE), a European cryptographic standard, and in the Cryptography Technology Evaluation Project (CRYPTREC) in Japan. CRYPTREC (Cryptography Research and Evaluation Committees), a Japanese cryptography evaluation project.