What Is AES ?

The origins of AES date back to 1997 when the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced that it needed a successor to the aging Data Encryption Standard (DES) which was becoming vulnerable to brute-force attacks.

This new encryption algorithm would be unclassified and had to be "capable of protecting sensitive government information well into the next century." It was to be easy to implement in hardware and software, as well as in restricted environments (for example, in a smart card) and offer good defenses against various attack techniques.