If you're shopping around for a VPN, you may have come across providers who tout "military grade encryption", but what does that actually mean?

AES — The Advanced Encryption Standard is one of the most secure symmetric encryption algorithms. It uses ciphers with 128-bit block sizes and key lengths of 128, 192, or 256 bits.

The AES algorithm repeats its core a number of times, depending on the encryption-key size. Just like DES, the AES algorithm refers to these loop repetitions as “rounds,” and the cipher must also ...

To make this happen, many designers are turning to the advanced encryption standard (AES) in their wireless and wireline networking designs. But, implementing AES is not an easy task. AES is a ...

Once the initial transaction is complete, the key that was exchanged during the initial RSA phase can now be used for SSL or VPN bulk encryption with algorithms like RC5, 3DES, or AES.

When it comes to encryption, the software largely uses the AES encryption algorithm alongside a few cascaded algorithms, such as AES-Twofish, AES-Twofish-Serpent, and more.

Encryption algorithms like RSA, AES and others are designed to make it extremely difficult to reverse-engineer the encrypted data without knowing the key used to encrypt it.

AES is approved for sensitive U.S. government information that is not classified, he adds. As for classified information, the algorithms used to protect it are, of course, themselves classified.