after reading up a little more on AES and still not fully understanding all of the processes I’ll need to implement, I figured I should just start writing the parts I do know I’ll need.
I wrote a method that converts a string of plain text to a string of it’s binary equivalent, then another that splits that string of binary into bytes (every 3 digits) and adds each one to an array, and another that prints it in a readable manner for testing purposes.
I’m still not done implementing the binary string to byte[] function as I just realized that the reason the byte variable type has 3 digits and not 4 is because it is not encoded in binary and I did not account for that in my code. I have a feeling I might find more systemic errors and/or redundancies in my code tomorrow as I’ve barely touched java (or coding for that matter) for 2 years, but I’ll work through them tomorrow and then move on the next step, which I believe is turning that 1D byte array into a 2D 4x4 column-major byte array for each 128 bits of text being encrypted.