👉 The DES (Data Encryption Standard) project was a U.S. government initiative aimed at developing a new symmetric-key block cipher to replace the aging Data Processing Standard (DPS), which was used for secure communication. Initiated in the early 1970s, DES was designed to offer stronger encryption than its predecessor, DES-64, and other competing algorithms like RSA. It uses a 56-bit key, which, while once considered secure, has since been vulnerable to brute-force attacks due to advancements in computing power. DES operates on 64-bit blocks of data, encrypting and decrypting information through a series of rounds involving substitution, permutation, and mixing operations. Despite its vulnerabilities, DES played a crucial role in the evolution of cryptographic standards and influenced the development of more robust encryption algorithms like AES.
