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Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)

An encryption standard developed by NIST, intended to specify an unclassified, publicly-disclosed, symmetric encryption algorithm. AES is now  the de facto standard for encrypting all forms of electronic information, replacing DES. AES-encrypted data is unbreakable in the sense that no known cryptanalysis attack can decrypt the AES cipher text without using a brute-force search through all possible 256-bit keys. On October 2, 2000, NIST announced that Rijndael had been selected as the proposed standard. On December 6, 2001, the Secretary of Commerce officially approved Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 197, which specifies that all sensitive, unclassified documents will use Rijndael as the Advanced Encryption Standard.

Authentication

Authentication is the process of determining whether someone or something is, in fact, who or what it is declared to be.  Strong authentication will require at least two of authentication factors – e.g “something you know”, a password, and “something you have”,  a smart card or USB token.