What do you mean by the term DES

Question

What do you mean by the term DES? Describe in brief.

Answer 1

DES is the Data Encryption Standard, an encryption block cipher stated and endorsed by U.S. government in the year 1977 as an official standard; the details can be found out in the latest official FIPS (that is, Federal Information Processing Standards) publication regarding DES. It was initially developed at IBM. DES has been widely studied as its publication and is the most famous and widely employed cryptosystem in the world.

DES is a symmetric cryptosystem: whenever used for communication, both sender and receiver must recognize the similar secret key, which is employed both to encrypt and decrypt the message. DES can as well be employed for single-user encryption, such as to store the files on a hard disk in encrypted form. In multi-user environment, secure key distribution might be hard; public-key cryptography gives an ideal solution to this problem.