AES is the de facto security standard for industry and the U.S. government. No method exists today to break the AES key in a reasonable amount of time. AES is used to secure data in government, medical, and financial sectors. Experts have calculated it would take 1 billion years to crack a 128-bit AES key using a brute force attack with a 10.51-petaflop supercomputer. That is longer than the age of the universe. Bumping up the key size to 256-bits takes it far beyond that.