Advanced Encryption Standard Process - Start of The Process

Start of The Process

On January 2, 1997, NIST announced that they wished to choose a successor to DES to be known as AES. Like DES, this was to be "an unclassified, publicly disclosed encryption algorithm capable of protecting sensitive government information well into the next century." However, rather than simply publishing a successor, NIST asked for input from interested parties on how the successor should be chosen. Interest from the open cryptographic community was immediately intense, and NIST received a great many submissions during the three month comment period.

The result of this feedback was a call for new algorithms on September 12, 1997. The algorithms were all to be block ciphers, supporting a block size of 128 bits and key sizes of 128, 192, and 256 bits. Such ciphers were rare at the time of the announcement; the best known was probably Square.