I run a World-leaders in Cryptography podcast, and I have invited some of the great people who have built the foundation for security on the Internet. But, there’s one person that I would have loved speaking with: Horst Feistel. He was a physicist turned cryptographer and whose work led to the creation of the Lucifer and DES (Data Encryption Standard) ciphers.
Horst’s original patent was filed in 1971 and then published in 1974. It was then officially announced on 17 March 1975 with the Federal Register [here]:
But, within two years, Marty Hellman and Whitfield Diffie publicly criticised DES as it only had an encryption key of 56 bits.
Goodbye DES
In 2017, NIST outlined that the use of Triple DES (aka TDEA/TDES) would be gone by the end of 2023. And, in June 2023, the industry was put on a warning that DES and 3DES should be gone by the start of 2024 [here]:
