Version 3 of aes

Updated 2008-01-13 11:32:23 by SLB

The Advanced Encryption Standard is the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology proposed replacement for the DES cipher. See US FIPS PUB 197 [L1 ]

AES is a block cipher once known as Rijndael which supports variable key and block sizes. As part of the NIST standardization the block size in AES is fixed at 128 bits and the permitted key sizes limited to 128, 192 or 256 bits. AES should be used in preference to DES in all new protocol designs.

A pure-Tcl implementation of AES is now included in tcllib and will be present in the 1.8 release.


SLB Using aes 1.0.0 in Tcl 8.5.0 on Windows, there are some quirks to be aware of:

  • Derypting an invalid string can cause the error 'integer value too large to represent'
  • If you decrypt using -in, the error is still reported even if you wrap a catch around the call, apparently due to use of fileevent in the implementation.
  • One source of invalid data is from encrypting a string whose length is not a multiple of 16 bytes. The documentation does tell you not to do this but if you forget, the encryption apparently succeeds yet fails in this obscure manner when decrypting.

Example:

    package require aes
    set key [string repeat - 16]
    set fullData {MalletData 9 q q q2 22}
    set encryptedData [aes::aes -dir encrypt -key $key $fullData]
    aes::aes -dir decrypt -key $key $encryptedData

See also des, blowfish, rc4

[Category Cryptography | Category Package]