From the text: This book by the designers of the block cipher presents Rijndael from scratch. The underlying mathematics and the wide trail strategy as the basic design idea are explained in detail and the basics of differential and linear cryptanalysis are reworked. Subsequent chapters review all known attacks against the Rijndael structure and deal with implementation and optimization issues. Finally, other ciphers related to Rijndael are presented.
When we wrote this book, we had basically two kinds of readers in mind. Perhaps the largest group of readers will consist of people who want to read a full and unambiguous description of Rijndael. For those readers, the most important chapter of this book is Chap. 3, that gives its comprehensive description.
In order to follow our description, it might be helpful to read the preliminaries given in Chap. 2. Advanced implementation aspects are discussed in Chap. 4. A short overview of the AES selection process is given in Chap. 1.
A large part of this book is aimed at the readers who want to know why we designed Rijndael in the way we did. For them, we explain the ideas and principles underlying the design of Rijndael, culminating in our wide trail design strategy. In Chap. 5 we explain our approach to block cipher design and the criteria that played an important role in the design of Rijndael. Our design strategy has grown out of our experiences with linear and differential cryptanalysis, two cryptanalytical attacks that have been applied with some success to the previous standard, the Data Encryption Standard (DES). In Chap. 6 we give a short overview of the DES and of the differential and the linear attacks that are applied to it. Our framework to describe linear cryptanalysis is explained in Chap. 7; differential cryptanalysis is described in Chap. 8. Finally, in Chap. 9, we explain how the wide trail design strategy follows from these considerations.
Chapter 10 gives an overview of the published attacks on reduced-round variants of Rijndael. Chapter 11 gives an overview of ciphers related to Rijndael. We describe its predecessors and discuss their similarities and differences. This is followed by a short description of a number of block ciphers that have been strongly influenced by Rijndael and its predecessors.
In Appendix A we show how linear and differential analysis can be applied to ciphers that are defined in terms of finite field operations rather than Boolean functions. In Appendix B we discuss extensions of differential and linear cryptanalysis. To assist programmers, Appendix C lists some tables that are used in various descriptions of Rijndael, Appendix D gives a set of test vectors, and Appendix E consists of an example implementation of Rijndael in the C programming language.
This volume is THE authoritative guide to the Rijndael algorithm and AES. Professionals, researchers, and students active or interested in data encryption will find it a valuable source of information and reference.