DES

• The Data Encryption Standard (DES) was the first encryption standard recommended by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), back in 1977, but has been subject to many attacks in the interim and, nowadays, is only permitted for legacy systems. A DES encryption key consists of 64 bits, but only 56 bits are used directly by the DES algorithm; the remaining 8 bits in the key may be used for error detection.