DES : Java Glossary

by Roedy Green ©1996-2008 Canadian Mind Products
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DES: Data Encryption Standard. A fairly weak encryption technique using 56-bit keys. It uses the same key to encrypt as to decrypt. There is only the private key, which both sender and receiver must know, unlike PGP and digital certificate encryption, which uses a public key to encrypt and a private key to decrypt, and a private key to digitally sign and a public key to verify the signature. A personal computer could crack DES-encoded message within a year; a group of them could do it proportionately faster. Presumably, the CIA has special purpose hardware for doing it in seconds. The advantage DES has over public key encryption is that it is much faster to compute. US law prohibits export of DES code with more than 64-bit keys.

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