Paper 2026/1035 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2026/1035 ↗
SoK: Rijndael-256
Abstract
Most symmetric modes of encryption that rely on PRP primitives are limited by the birthday bound over the block size (can’t encrypt more than $2^{n/2}$ blocks). This could be a severe limitation if current block width of 128 is used (can’t encrypt more than $2^{64}$ blocks) for cloud systems that transact a large amount of data. This limitation can be overcome by either realizing a mode of encryption based on a PRF (that doesn’t suffer from the birthday bound) or by using a wider block cipher like Rijndael−256 which allows us to encrypt $2^{128}$ blocks. In this paper, we focus on the wider block method as manifested in Rijndael−256. We survey theoretical and practical security for Rijndael-256. We also look at implementations of Rijndael−256 that take advantage of vectorized AES−NI which optimizes performance.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
PDF- Category
- Secret-key cryptography
- Publication info
- Preprint.
- History
- 2026-05-22: last updated
- 2026-05-22: published
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2026/1035
- License
- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/1035,
author = {Dessalegn Ayalneh and Anas Hlayhel and Setareh Sharifian and Alexander Tereschenko},
title = {SoK: Rijndael-256},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/1035},
year = {2026},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/1035}
}