A stick figure's guilde to AES

[iago]

http://www.moserware.com/2009/09/stick-figure-guide-to-advanced.html

How AES (advanced encryption standard) works, illustrated by stick figures!

[rabbit]

Great

[Towelie]

Yeah... the stick figures didn't help me understand it

[Camel]

This is an awesome breakdown, very well written. I think that some of the math frames could have been made easier to understand; the notation could be overwhelming. They don't explicitly state that the 0-7 field corresponds to bits in a byte, so this frame could be interpreted as nonsense to someone who didn't get that, when in reality it's pretty simple stuff:


[edit] their choice of 0xb for the low four bits a few frames later is also confusing, since they used the same character as a variable earlier. They could have clarified that by using B instead of b.

[iago]

I got lost in the math bits, but everything else was cool.

[Camel]

I'm assuming you know the math pretty well though? Just the way they explained it was confusing?

[iago]

I didn't really look. I've never dealt with the math behind encryption before, it falls in my "don't know don't care" domain.

[Ergot]

Mmm, I wish all material was presented like that. So fun and educational

[while1]

I'm assuming you know the math pretty well though? Just the way they explained it was confusing?

Yeah, the way they explained it is unnecessarily cluttered and confusing.  And the notation they used not very friendly to readability (i.e. the circle around a plus sign made me go WTF for a second).

[iago]

I'm assuming you know the math pretty well though? Just the way they explained it was confusing?

Yeah, the way they explained it is unnecessarily cluttered and confusing.  And the notation they used not very friendly to readability (i.e. the circle around a plus sign made me go WTF for a second).

Circle around the plus sign is a standard symbol for 'xor' -- I assume that's what it's supposed to be?

[Camel]

Yes, that's what it's supposed to be.

I got lost in the math bits, but everything else was cool.

i see wut u did there

[Sidoh]

I'm assuming you know the math pretty well though? Just the way they explained it was confusing?

Yeah, the way they explained it is unnecessarily cluttered and confusing.  And the notation they used not very friendly to readability (i.e. the circle around a plus sign made me go WTF for a second).

Circle around the plus sign is a standard symbol for 'xor' -- I assume that's what it's supposed to be?

In the cryptography community, it's normally referred to as "mod 2 addition", which is, of course, equivalent to xor when we're talking about binary.

[Camel]