To ensure compatibility with their flagship product, the security engineer is tasked to recommend
an encryption cipher that will be compatible with the majority of third party software and hardware
vendors. Which of the following should be recommended?

A.
SHA

B.
MD5

C.
Blowfish

D.
AES

Explanation:
AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) has been adopted by the U.S. government and is now used
worldwide. It supersedes the Data Encryption Standard (DES) which was published in 1977. The
algorithm described by AES is a symmetric-key algorithm, meaning the same key is used for both
encrypting and decrypting the data. AES is used to encrypt data, not to verify data integrity.