The Breaking the AES Cipher Model encrypts a plaintext message using AES encryption and attempts to break this encryption using a plaintext attack.  The attacker (Eve) obtains both the plaintext and the cyphered text for a message between two people, Alice and Bob, and systematically encrypts the plaintext using the AES encryption function with all possible keys until the function's output matches the known cyphered text.  Eve starts with a key, feeds the key and the plaintext into the encryption function,  and checks whether the cyphered text is equal to the known value.  If so, Eve has found the correct key.  Otherwise, Eve systematically changes the key until she is successful. If the key is small or if Eve knows some of the key, the computational task may be manageable.  This model displays the computation time using both a sequential and a parallel do-loop implementation of the plaintext attack.  The model is designed to show how Java performs standard AES encryption and to test the speedup and sizeup of parallel computation using multi-core processors.

The Breaking the AES Cipher Model was created using the Easy Java Simulations (EJS) modeling tool.  It is distributed as a ready-to-run (compiled) Java archive.  Double clicking the model's jar file will run the simulation if Java is installed.

Please note that this resource requires at least version 1.6 of Java.