title: AES encryption of 16 bytes without salt
body: <p>How secure is it to encrypt 16 bytes of data as a single block with AES? No salt/IV, no mode of operation, millions of different 16 byte blocks encrypted. I don't know enough about crypto but this smells to me.</p>
  
  <p>Edit: to give a bit more detail this is not about encrypting a message but a database table column where the plain text length happens to be 16 bytes. The data is not totally random (the first 8 bytes will frequently be the same) and there is a checksum to identify a successful decryption.</p>
  
  <p>I'm going into a meeting with the guys proposing this next week and, if there is a problem, would greatly appreciate some pointers to reference material with which I can show that the design is insecure. I'm not totally familiar with the system but I think this could require a major redesign to get around so there is likely to be a lot of resistance. Most of the people (and the power) involved are on the business side where the motivation is to get a working system...</p>