* "Deep Crack" and Distributed.net came after DES was fatally injured by differential and linear cryptanalysis.
* At no point was the only alternative to the broken DES "Triple-DES"; we had (for instance) IDEA since 1991, which is what PGP used.
* Speed isn't the biggest reason we ditched DES-EDE; the tiny block size and key size restrictions are bigger reasons. Similarly, "at least as strong as Triple-DES" is misleading; nobody was satisfied with Triple-DES' security bounds.
Just nits. The AES math stuff is great. But don't go trying to use any of this; this is just a fraction of the detail you need to safely use an AES library.
There isn't one. Even _Practical Cryptography_, my favorite of the encryption books, misses details (some of them recent discoveries, others older) that can completely wreck the security of an application that depends on AES for security; also, as well-written as the book is, it's organized in a way that makes it possible to miss some of the key details that it does document.
If you need encryption in your application, you should use TLS or GPG/PGP to get it.
* "Deep Crack" and Distributed.net came after DES was fatally injured by differential and linear cryptanalysis.
* At no point was the only alternative to the broken DES "Triple-DES"; we had (for instance) IDEA since 1991, which is what PGP used.
* Speed isn't the biggest reason we ditched DES-EDE; the tiny block size and key size restrictions are bigger reasons. Similarly, "at least as strong as Triple-DES" is misleading; nobody was satisfied with Triple-DES' security bounds.
Just nits. The AES math stuff is great. But don't go trying to use any of this; this is just a fraction of the detail you need to safely use an AES library.