Meaning – A lot of business and activities take place online, and with this increasing dependency on web related services, the data security has become a crucial point of study for many organisations.
In case of cybersecurity agencies the first and probably the most powerful weapon, is data encryption. This process has been in use since ancient times, and while the techniques have evolved, the essence has remained the same.
Today, no discussion of data encryption is complete without taking a look at the Data Encryption Standard.
The Data Encryption Standard, or the DES, is the symmetric-key block cipher created in the early 1970s by an IBM team and adopted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Since it’s a symmetric-key algorithm, it employs the same key in both encrypting and decrypting the data. If it were an asymmetrical algorithm, it would use different keys for encryption and decryption.
This data encryption standard was adopted by the U.S. government as Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication 46, which allows only hardware implementations of the data encryption algorithm.
Example of usage – “The new recruits of the cybersecurity firm, were required to do a detailed study on the data encryption standard, before working on developing new encryption techniques.”
