Alternatives to DES

Question

Write down the Alternatives to DES? Illustrate in brief.

Answer 1

Over the years, different new block cipher algorithms have been designed as the alternatives to DES. One is FEAL, a cipher for which many attacks have been discovered. IDEA is a cipher designed by the Lai and Massey which seems much more promising and two more latest designs are RC5 and SAFER. Additionally, the U.S. government announced in the year 1993 an algorithm termed as Skipjack as part of its Capstone project. Skipjack functions on 64-bit blocks of data, as does DES, however use 80-bit keys, as opposed to the 56-bit keys in DES. Though, the details of Skipjack are classified, therefore Skipjack is just available in hardware from the government-authorized manufacturers.