Data Encryption Standard

In computing, widely used US government standard for encryption, adopted in 1977 and recertified for five more years in 1993. DES was developed by IBM and adopted as a government standard by the National Security Agency. It is a private-key system, so that the sender and recipient encrypt and decrypt the message using the same key.

This means that a secure way has to be found to send the key from one party to the other; any third party who has the key can decrypt the encoded transmissions. Concerns over the long-term security of DES in the face of increasingly available cheap hardware have been somewhat mitigated by new techniques such as triply encrypted DES.