AES (Rijndael)

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), also known as Rijndael, is a symmetric block cipher adopted as the official encryption standard by the U.S. government in 2001. It processes data in 128-bit blocks using 128, 192, or 256-bit keys and performs multiple rounds of substitution, permutation, and mixing operations. AES is the most widely used symmetric encryption algorithm today, securing everything from government communications to everyday internet traffic.