RSA: Cryptographers revisit DES
A group of leading cryptography experts discussed one of the field's earliest conflicts Tuesday at the RSA conference.
The panel recalled the development of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) and the drama that surrounded its development in the 1970s.
Dickie George, a technical director for information assurance with the NSA who helped work on the system, said that the DES format, designed in a partnership between the government and IBM, stirred up an interesting mixture of political and mathematical debate in its development. "No one could envision how it exploded, and we certainly didn’t envision how widespread it would be," said George.
