Abstract

Cryptology is the science of both cryptography and cryptanalysis, also known as the making and breaking of codes. This paper traces the history of codes from their origins up to the modern day standard AES, the Advanced Encryption Standard. This paper focuses on the internal functions of AES and the implementation of AES in software. Both the encryption and decryption algorithms of AES are implemented and the process to find the inverse operations is discussed in detail. A simplified version of AES is also discussed to investigate differential cryptanalysis. Differential cryptanalysis is one way of breaking AES by finding possible key values based on a specific difference between two plaintexts. The final section goes into brief detail of how differential cryptanalysis is applied to the full AES algorithm and is future work for this paper.

Advisor

Breitenbucher, Jon

Second Advisor

Byrnes, Denise D.

Department

Computer Science; Mathematics

Disciplines

Applied Mathematics

Publication Date

2009

Degree Granted

Bachelor of Arts

Document Type

Senior Independent Study Thesis

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© Copyright 2009 Ellen Wagner