5.1-5.2

The Rijndael cipher looks much simpler than DES in terms of how the steps work. I thought the cipher was easier to visualize since the steps were linear and there was no switching back and forth of the halves of the cipher. I didn't understand why they chose to create the sbox the way they did since it referes to GF(2^8) which I don't have much intuitave sense on.