Software Security — How does AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) work

Explained step by step with example

Definition

Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001. AES is widely used today as it is a much stronger than DES and triple DES despite being harder to implement.

How it works

AES encryption is split into 5 processes, and each process will run 10 rounds.

Let's start.

Step 1 Generate Hex Matrix

Data string → split into block (size=16) Plain text → Hex

Step 2 SubBytes

Once we have the plain text hex matrix, we want to do something with it, yes encrypt it.

So the first step of encryption is to replace the real data with a mapping table which we called ‘S-Box’.

What we will do with this matrix is very simple. mapping.