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The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is an algorithm originally known as Rijndael after its inventors Vincent Rijmen and Joan Daemen [507]. It acts on 128-bit blocks and can use a key of 128, 192 or 256 bits in length. It is an SP-network; in order to specify it, we need to fix the S-boxes, the linear transformation between the rounds, and the way in which the key is added into the computation.

AES uses a single S-box that acts on a byte input to give a byte output. For implementation purposes it can be regarded simply as a lookup table of 256 bytes; it is actually defined by the equation over the field where is a suitably chosen matrix and is a constant. This construction gives tight differential and linear bounds.

The linear transformation is based on arranging the 16 bytes of the value being enciphered in a square and then doing bytewise shuffling and mixing operations. The first step is the shuffle, in which the top row of four bytes is left unchanged while the second row is shifted one place to the left, the third row by two places and the fourth row by three places. The second step is a column-mixing step in which the four bytes in a column are mixed using matrix multiplication. This is illustrated in Figure 5.11, which shows, as an example, how a change in the value of the third byte in the first column is propagated. The effect of this combination is that a change in the input to the cipher can potentially affect all of the output after just two rounds – an avalanche effect that makes both linear and differential attacks harder.

The key material is added byte by byte after the linear transformation. This means that 16 bytes of key material are needed per round; they are derived from the user supplied key material by means of a recurrence relation.

Figure 5.11: The AES linear transformation, illustrated by its effect on byte 3 of the input

The algorithm uses 10 rounds with 128-bit keys, 12 rounds with 192-bit keys and 14 rounds with 256-bit keys. These are enough to give practical, but not certificational, security – as indeed we expected at the time of the AES competition, and as I described in earlier editions of this chapter. The first key-recovery attacks use a technique called biclique cryptanalysis and were discovered in 2009 by Andrey Bogdanov, Dmitry Khovratovich, and Christian Rechberger [274]; they give only a very small advantage, with complexity now estimated at for 128-bit AES and for 256-bit AES, as opposed to and for brute-force search. Faster shortcut attacks are known for the case where we have related keys. But none of these attacks make any difference in practice, as they require infeasibly large numbers of texts or very special combinations of related keys.

Should we trust AES? The governments of Russia, China and Japan try to get firms to use local ciphers instead, and the Japanese offering, Camellia, is found in a number of crypto libraries alongside AES and another AES competition finalist, Bruce Schneier's Twofish. (Camellia was designed by a team whose own AES candidate was knocked out at the first round.) Conspiracy theorists note that the US government picked the weakest of the five algorithms that were finalists in the AES competition. Well, I was one of the designers of the AES finalist Serpent [95], which came second in the competition: the winner Rijndael got 86 votes, Serpent 59 votes, Twofish 31 votes, RC6 23 votes and MARS 13 votes. Serpent has a simple structure that makes it easy to analyse – the structure of Figure 5.10, but modified to be wide enough and to have enough rounds – and was designed to have a much larger security margin than Rijndael in anticipation of the attacks that have now appeared. Yet the simple fact is that while Serpent is more secure, Rijndael is faster; industry and crypto researchers voted for it at the last AES conference, and NIST approved it as the standard.

Having been involved in the whole process, and having worked on the analysis and design of shared-key ciphers for much of the 1990s, I have a high level of confidence that AES is secure against practical attacks based on mathematical cryptanalysis. And even though AES is less secure than Serpent, practical security is all about implementation, and we now have enormous experience at implementing AES. Practical attacks include timing analysis and power analysis. In the former, the main risk is that an opponent observes cache misses and uses them to work out the key. In the latter, an opponent uses measurements of the current drawn by the device doing the crypto – think of a bank smartcard that a customer places in a terminal in a Mafia-owned shop. I discuss both in detail in Part 2, in the chapter on Emission Security; countermeasures include special operations in many CPUs to do AES, which are available precisely because the algorithm is now a standard. It does not make sense to implement Serpent as well, ‘just in case AES is broken’: having swappable algorithms is known as pluggable cryptography, yet the risk of a fatal error in the algorithm negotiation protocol is orders of magnitude greater than the risk that anyone will come up with a production attack on AES. (We'll see a number of examples later where using multiple algorithms caused something to break horribly.)

The back story is that, back in the 1970s, the NSA manipulated the choice and parameters of the previous standard block cipher, the Data Encryption Standard (DES) in such a way as to deliver a cipher that was good enough for US industry at the time, while causing foreign governments to believe it was insecure, so they used their own weak designs instead. I'll discuss this in more detail below, once I've described the design of DES. AES seems to have followed this playbook; by selecting an algorithm that was only just strong enough mathematically and whose safe implementation requires skill and care, the US government saw to it that firms in Russia, China, Japan and elsewhere will end up using systems that are less secure because less skill and effort has been invested in the implementation. However, this was probably luck rather than Machiavellian cunning: the relevant committee at NIST would have had to have a lot of courage to disregard the vote and choose another algorithm instead. Oh, and the NSA has since 2005 approved AES with 128-bit keys for protecting information up to SECRET and with 192-bit or 256-bit keys for TOP SECRET. So I recommend that you use AES instead of GOST, or Camellia, or even Serpent. The definitive specification of AES is Federal Information Processing Standard 197, and its inventors have written a book describing its design in detail [507].