The Advanced Encryption Standard, being planned by NIST as a replacement for DES. DES was developed in secret; AES is being chosen by an open competition which most of the world's top cryptographers have entered. The fifteen entries should be reduced to about five in summer 1999, and the final winner should be announced in summer 2000 (though these times may slip).
AES will be a symmetric encryption algorithm with a key of 128-256 bits and a blocksize of 16 bytes.