AES Rijndael
AES, also known as Rijndael, was chosen as a very robust algorithm by NIST (the US government) in 2001 after a 3-year testing period among the cryptologist community.
Among the 15 candidates who competed for the best algorithm, there were five finalists chosen: MARS (IBM), RC6 (RSA Laboratories), Rijndael (Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen), Serpent (Ross Anderson and others), and Twofish (Bruce Schneier and others). All the candidates were very strong but, in the end, Rijndael was a clear winner.
The first curious question is about its name: how is Rijndael pronounced?
It's dubiously difficult to pronounce this name. From the web page of the two authors, we can read that there are a few ways to pronounce this name depending on the nationality and the mother tongue of who pronounces it.
Just to start, I can say that AES is a block cipher, so it can be performed in different modes: ECB (already seen in DES), Cipher Block Chaining (CBC), Cypher Feedback Block...
