A.E.S. Advanced Encryption Standard
AES is a small, fast, hard to crack encryption standard and is suitable for a wide range of devices or applications. It has been determined as the best compromise between a combination of security, performance, efficiency, ease of implementation and flexibility.
128 bit AES offers a total of 3.4 x 10^38 individual keys. It is estimated that if a DES key generator were able to discover 1 DES key per second, it would take 149 thousand-billion (149 trillion) years to crack a single 128 bit AES key. Currently, the technology is not available.
As a note, the universe is accepted as being only approximately 20 billion years old !
AES / DES What is the Difference?
D.E.S. Data Encryption Standard
A.E.S. Advanced Encryption Standard
A standard DES encryption key is 56 bits long. Although considered very secure at the time of it’s release in the mid 1970’s, advancement in computer technology has assisted in the development of techniques to crack DES keys in meaningful time periods.
In 1999 a distributed computing project managed to crack a DES key in 22 hours and 15 minutes. DES encryption is no longer considered strong enough for high security applications.
AES keys can be 128, 192 or 256 bits long. Most commonly the 128 bit key length is used – giving a total of 3.4 x 10^38 possible keys. AES development has been a co-operative venture between the U.S. government and the private industry sector resulting in a encryption system that is royalty free.