The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) "...is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) "...is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001.[3] It is based on the Rijndael cipher[4] developed by two Belgian cryptographers, Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, who submitted a proposal which was evaluated by the NIST during the AES selection process.[5] AES has been adopted by the U.S. government and is now used worldwide. It supersedes the Data Encryption Standard (DES),[6] which was published in 1977. The algorithm described by AES is a symmetric-key algorithm, meaning the same key is used for both encrypting and decrypting the data. AES is available in many different encryption packages, and is the first publicly accessible and open cipher approved by the National Security Agency (NSA) for top secret information when used in an NSA approved cryptographic module (see Security of AES, below)..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard RdRand (also RDRAND) "...is an instruction for returning random numbers from an on-chip random number generator.[1] RdRand is available in Ivy Bridge processors[note 1] and is part of the Intel 64 and IA-32 instruction set architectures. Intel Secure Key, formerly known as Bull Mountain, is Intel's code name for both the RdRand instruction and the underlying random number generator (RNG) hardware implementation.[1] Intel calls their RNG a "digital random number generator". The generator uses an on-processor entropy source, which passes the randomly generated bits to an AES (in CBC-MAC mode) conditioner to distill the entropy into non-deterministic random numbers. A deterministic random-bit generator is seeded by the output from the conditioner, providing cryptographically secure random numbers to applications requesting them via the RdRand instruction..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDRAND http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDRAND