A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)

moserware.com

178 points·moserware··8 comments

Favorite part:

"Foot-Shooting Prevention Agreement: I, (your name), promise that once I see how simple AES really is, I will not implement it in production code even though it would be really fun. This agreement shall be in effect until the undersigned creates a meaningful interpretive dance that compares and contrasts cache-based, timing, and other side channel attacks and their countermeasures. (Signature) (Date)"

That being said, for my PHP+MySQL bretheren:

http://phpseclib.sourceforge.net/

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/encryption-functions....

The first person to actually do this has lots of HN karma coming his way.

Nice flash animation explaining AES:

http://www.cs.bc.edu/~straubin/cs381-05/blockciphers/rijndae...

This is pretty neat. How long did it take you to draw each panel?

I'm embarrassed to say: each one took about 10-25 minutes. The math ones took a lot longer. I used up two Sharpie markers in the process. My handwriting was hard to read, so I had to do a lot of editing with Paint.net to make them legible.

That was amazingly well done. I wish you'd have been around to teach my Secure OS class when we were taught AES implementations. ;)

Kudos, and thanks for taking the time. It was great!

Amazing work. Thank you.

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