First Flaws in the Advanced Encryption Standard Used for Internet Banking Identified

Researchers have found a weakness in the AES algorithm. They managed to come up with a clever new attack that can recover the secret key four times easier than anticipated by experts.

The attack is a result of a long-term cryptanalysis project carried out by Andrey Bogdanov (K.U.Leuven, visiting Microsoft Research at the time of obtaining the results), Dmitry Khovratovich (Microsoft Research), and Christian Rechberger (ENS Paris, visiting Microsoft Research).

The AES algorithm is used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide to protect internet banking, wireless communications, and the data on their hard disks. In 2000, the Rijndael algorithm, designed by the Belgian cryptographers Dr. Joan Daemen (STMicroelectronics) and Prof. Vincent Rijmen (K.U.Leuven), was selected as the winner of an open competition organized by the US NIST (National Institute for Standards and Technology). Today AES is used in more than 1700 NIST-validated products and thousands of others; it has been standardized by NIST, ISO, and IEEE and it has been approved by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) for protecting secret and even top secret information.

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