What does the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) represent?

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is recognized as a symmetric-key block cipher algorithm, which means it uses the same key for both encryption and decryption. This type of encryption is designed to securely encrypt and decrypt data in blocks, providing a robust method for securing information. AES supports different key lengths such as 128, 192, and 256 bits, enhancing its security levels, and making it suitable for a wide range of applications from securing sensitive data to encrypting communications.

In contrast, asymmetric encryption methods involve using two different keys—one public and one private—for encryption and decryption, making them fundamentally different from AES. A compression algorithm reduces the size of data without necessarily adding security, while a hashing function generates a fixed-size hash value from input data, which is useful for integrity checks but does not encrypt data in a way that can be reversed.