ABSTRACT
In 1972, the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) Institute for Computer Sciences and Technology (ICST) initiated a project in computer security, a subject then in its infancy. This chapter describes the NBS’s Data Encryption Standard (DES), relating the context in which the publication appeared, its impact on science, technology, and the general public, and brief details about the lives and work of the author. In 1973 the Bureau hired Dennis Branstad to lead the new computer security project and to coordinate the DES development process. After NBS published the DES, the algorithm was adopted as an ANSI standard in 1981 and incorporated in a family of related standards for security in the financial services industry. The DES algorithm is a block cipher that uses the same binary key both to encrypt and decrypt data blocks, and thus is called a symmetric key cipher. DES uses a sequence of operations, including several substitution and permutation primitives, to encrypt a data block.
