The American National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) is rather busy on the cryptographic front these days. Not only has it been busy in the area of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), it is also in the process of standardizing the lightweight cipher Ascon, and it is also embarking soon on a major effort to examine threshold cryptography, but in late 2024 it announced that it would be looking at standardizing a larger block size variant of the AES algorithm.
To understand what this proposal is, and why it is important, we need to dig a bit deeper into what a block cipher is, and the history of the AES algorithm.
