AES Encryption with the Flexibility to Interoperate
with Other AES Encryption Software and Systems.

Latest Release: v1.2.0

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Maximum Interoperability with Other AES Encryption Software

AES Interop provides strong AES encryption designed for maximum interoperability with other AES encryption software and systems. Many developers only become aware of interoperability issues after purchasing encryption software. This happens when encrypted data is shared with a business partner, but then it is found that the same software package must be used for decryption to be successful. AES Interop is designed to alleviate this issue and to provide an easy and cost-effective way to implement AES encryption in software that communicates directly or indirectly with other software systems.

Chilkat has determined the major factors that lead to AES encryption incompatibility:

1. Password Phrase to Secret Key Algorithm: AES encryption operates with 128, 192, and 256-bit binary secret keys. This means that if you want your encryption to be password-based, your password character string needs to be 1-way hashed to the appropriate-length binary key. Different vendors use different algorithms. Chilkat has provided the most common 1-way hashing algorithms for this purpose (SHA128, SHA384, SHA512, HAVAL, MD5, MD2, etc.) This allows another vendor's Pass-Phrase-to-Secret-Key algorithm to be duplicated. In the case where you are not able to implement a vendor's algorithm, we have designed AES Interop to be open-ended such that additional Pass-Phrase-to-Secret-Key algorithms can be added in the future. Chilkat is an expert in this domain, and is willing to evaluate your needs and develop custom software to fit your needs on a contract basis if necessary.
2. Padding Schemes: AES encryption pads input data to a multiple of 16 bytes. The software that decrypts must know the original size of the data, and this information is often embedded in the extra bytes used to pad the original data. Both encryptor and decryptor must agree on the padding scheme. AES Interop implements the three most common padding schemes: FIPS81, RFC 1423, and random-byte padding.
3. Cipher Modes: The AES encryption algorithm can operate in a number of different modes, and the encryptor and decryptor must both operate in the same mode. AES Interop provides for Cipher-Block-Chaining (CBC) and Electronic Cookbook (ECB). The CBC mode is more secure, but ECB is higher-performance.
4. Initialization Vector: The initialization vector is 16 bytes of binary data used to initialize the Rijndael algorithm. Both encryptor and decryptor must use the same IV for successful decryption.

AES Encryption Designed for ASP Too!

One design goal for AES Interop is to make it easy to use in an ASP Web application. We have provided the latest BZip2 compression and Binary-to-HexString conversion features to make it easy to pass encrypted data as HTML form parameters.

1. BZip2 Compression: Chilkat provides state-of-the-art BZip2 data compression to allow ASP pages or any other type of application to reduce the size of data encrypted and transmitted. To maximize peformance with BZip2 compression, be sure to compress the data before encrypting, and not after.
2. Binary-to-Hex-String Conversion: This feature makes it easy to pass encrypted data in HTML form parameters. The encrypted data is converted to an ASCII string containing only the characters 0-9 and A-F.
3. Base64 and Quoted-Printable: These encodings are often needed, and Chilkat has provided encoding and decoding capability in this component for convenience.

How Strong is 128-Bit AES Encryption?

What is the chance that someone could use the "DES Cracker"-like hardware to crack an AES key? In the late 1990s, specialized "DES Cracker" machines were built that could recover a DES key after a few hours. In other words, by trying possible key values, the hardware could determine which key was used to encrypt a message. Assuming that one could build a machine that could recover a DES key in a second (i.e., try 255 keys per second), then it would take that machine approximately 149 thousand-billion (149 trillion) years to crack a 128-bit AES key. To put that into perspective, the universe is believed to be less than 20 billion years old.

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