Time for triple AES?

Today morning, I tuned to some concerning news in Bruce Schneier’s blog. Bruce writes about a new attack against 10-round AES-256. He defines it as impressive, practical, and more devastating attack that we have ever seen against AES.

Full AES-256 has 14 rounds, thus there still is some margin left … however, we also know that when there’s smoke there’s fire. Cryptography is an interesting science (and art). It would appear that AES with a 128-bit key is totally immune from these attacks and is as strong as ever. Uhm. I’ve heard that this is due to AES-256’s key schedule being ill-designed. The reason why is beyond me.

Rijndael (as it was called before being awarded the contest) was heralded as the transform for the new century. For the first time in ages, it featured a radical new design.  These research results are coming out way too soon. Concerned.