Data Encryption Standard (DES)- Overview

Issued in 1977 by the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) as Federal Information Processing Standard 46. Was the most widely used encryption scheme until the introduction of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in 2001 Algorithm itself is referred to as the Data Encryption Algorithm (DEA) Data are encrypted in 64-bit blocks using a 56-bit key The algorithm transforms 64-bit input in a series of steps into a 64-bit output The same steps, with the same key, are used to reverse the encryption