The document discusses the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), which was selected by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2000 to replace the older Data Encryption Standard (DES). It describes the origins and development of AES, including the evaluation process where Rijndael was selected as the winning algorithm. The summary also provides a high-level overview of how AES works, including its conceptual scheme, encryption rounds, key scheduling, and security against known attacks.