The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a symmetric encryption technique used to secure data. It was developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the United States and officially recognized as a standard in 2001. AES replaces the outdated Data Encryption Standard (DES) due to its improved security and efficiency.

AES uses an algorithm that takes a message and a key as input and converts the message into an encrypted form. The recipient can then use the same key to restore the encrypted message. AES supports various key lengths, including 128, 192, and 256 bits, with 128 bits being the most commonly used key length.

Since AES is a symmetric encryption method, this means that the same key is used both to encrypt and decrypt the data. This makes AES fast and efficient for encrypting large amounts of data, making it a widely adopted standard for securing data in areas such as network security, database encryption, and data storage.