Question

I am using the public domain reference implementation of AES Rijndael, commonly distributed under the name “rijndael-fst-3.0.zip”. I plan to use this to encrypt network data, and I am wondering whether the results of encryption will be different on big/little endian architectures? In other words, can I encrypt a block of 16 bytes on a little endian machine and then decrypt that same block on big endian? And of course, the other way around as well.

If not, how should I go about swapping bytes?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Kind regards.

Answer 1

Rijndael is oblivious to byte order; it just sees the string of bytes you feed it. You should do the byte swapping outside of it as you always would (with ntohs or whatever interface your platform has for that purpose).