Assignment No.

Question No.1

What was the original set of criteria used by NIST to evaluate candidate AES ciphers?

 Security: Actual security; randomness; soundness, other security factors.

 Cost: Licensing requirements; computational efficiency; memory requirements.
 Algorithm and Implementation Characteristics: Flexibility; hardware and software suitability;
simplicity.

Question No.2

What was the final set of criteria used by NIST to evaluate candidate AES ciphers?

General security; software implementations; restricted-space environments; hardware implementations;

attacks on implementations; encryption vs. decryption; key agility; other versatility and flexibility;
potential for instruction-level parallelism. 

Question No.3

What is the difference between Rijndael and AES?

The only difference between Rijndael and the AES is the range of supported values for the block length
and cipher key length. Rijndael is a block cipher with both a variable block length and a variable key
length. The block length and the key length can be independently specified to any multiple of 32 bits,
with a minimum of 128 bits and a maximum of 256 bits. It would be possible to define versions of
Rijndael with a higher block length or key length, but currently there seems no need for it. The AES fixes
the block length to 128 bits, and supports key lengths of 128, 192 or 256 bits only. The extra block and
key lengths in Rijndael were not evaluated in the AES selection process, and consequently they are not
adopted in the current FIPS standard.