Serious Cryptography

4BLOCK CIPHERS

During the Cold War, the US and Soviets developed their own ciphers. The US government created the Data Encryption Standard (DES), which was adopted as a federal standard from 1979 to 2005, while the KGB developed GOST 28147-89, an algorithm kept secret until 1990 and still used today. In 2000, the US-based National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) selected the successor to DES, called the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), an algorithm developed in Belgium and now found in most electronic devices. AES, DES, and GOST 28147-89 have something in common: they’re all block ciphers, a type of cipher that combines a core ...