Comment Articles

After thirty years DES is about to slip quietly into the night

Bruce Schneier ZDNet

Published: 28 Sep 2004 15:30 BST

The Data Encryption Standard, or DES, was a mid-1970s brainchild of the National Bureau of Standards: the first modern, public, freely available encryption algorithm. For over two decades, DES was the workhorse of commercial cryptography.

Over the decades, DES has been used to protect everything from databases in mainframe computers, to the communications links between ATMs and banks, to data transmissions between police cars and police stations. Whoever you are, I can guarantee that many times in your life, the security of your data was protected by DES.

Just last month, the former American National Bureau of Standards -- the agency is now called the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST -- proposed withdrawing DES as an encryption standard, signifying the end of the American government's most important technology standards, one more important than ASCII, I would argue.

Today, cryptography is one of the most basic tools of computer security, but 30 years ago it barely existed as an academic discipline. In the days when the Internet was little more than a curiosity, cryptography wasn't even a recognised branch of mathematics. Secret codes were always fascinating, but they were pencil-and-paper codes based on alphabets. In the secret government labs during World War II, cryptography entered the computer era and became mathematics. But with no professors teaching it, and no conferences discussing it, all the cryptographic research in the United States was conducted at the National Security Agency.

And then came DES.