In Memory of Horst Feistel
How IBM Made The World A Whole Lot More Secure
IBM is a renowned world leader in cryptography, and is developing an amazing platform for trust with their Hyperledger project. The roots of their lead can be traced back to the creation of the Feistel cipher and which implements a symmetric key method.
In the 1960s, though, most of the cryptography research was conducted by governments, but IBM spotted a commercial opportunity and setup a cryptography research group in their Yorktown Heights, NY laboratory (and named after IBM’s founder — Thomas J. Watson Sr.). The lab went on to produce amazing advancements such as DRAM, the relational database and the FORTRAN programming language:
One of their best recruits was Horst Feistel, a physicist turned cryptographer, and who joined them in the 1970s. His work led to the creation of the Lucifer and DES (Data Encryption Standard) ciphers:
In the early 1970s, IBM patented the Lucifer cipher and which was then used by…
