The primary developers are named as Rami Lehti and Pablo Virolainen, who are both associated with the Tampere University of Technology, along with Richard van den Berg, an independent Dutch security consultant.

AIDE takes a "snapshot" of the state of the system, register hashes, modification times, and other data regarding the files defined by the administrator.

This "snapshot" is used to build a database that is saved and may be stored on an external device for safekeeping.

Should a change have happened to the computer between the snapshot creation and the test, AIDE will detect it and report it to the administrator.

[2] This is mainly useful for security purposes, given that any malicious change which could have happened inside the system would be reported by AIDE.