The DES standard is considered insecure and not recommended for most practical uses. The Data Encryption Standard (DES), is the name of the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 46-3, which describes the data encryption algorithm (DEA). The DEA is also defined in the ANSI standard X3.92. DEA is an improvement of the algorithm Lucifer developed by IBM in the early 1970s. IBM, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Bureau of Standards (NBS now National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST) developed the algorithm. DES was replaced by Triple DES which has itself been superseded by AES.

DES Algorithm

The DES has a 64-bit block size and uses a 56-bit key during execution (8 parity bits are stripped off from the full 64-bit key). These sizes are too small by today’s standards.  DES is a symmetric cryptosystem, specifically a 16-round Feistel cipher. When used for communication, both sender and receiver must know the same secret key, which can be used to encrypt and decrypt the message, or to generate and verify a Message Authentication Code (MAC). The DES can also be used for single-user encryption, such as to store files on a hard disk in encrypted form.

DES Modes of Operation




Software Libraries

VOCAL’s embedded software libraries include a complete range of ETSI / ITU / IEEE compliant algorithms, in addition to many other standard and proprietary algorithms. Our source code is optimized for execution on ANSI C and leading DSP architectures from TI, ADI, AMD, Intel, ARM, MIPS and other vendors. These libraries are modular and can be executed as a single task under a variety of operating systems or standalone with its own microkernel.