🛠️ Invention or technique

Feistel cipher

Cifrado de Feistel

Date
1973 · confidence medium
Place
Yorktown Heights, New York, United States
Credited to
Horst Feistel
Field
Knowledge & symbols

What it is

A symmetric structure for building block ciphers in which encryption and decryption are almost identical operations, based on iterating a round function a fixed number of times. It is used by a large number of ciphers, including the DES standard.

Feistel developed the idea while researching at IBM in the 1960s; he formalised it publicly in a 1973 paper.

What it led to

  • The Data Encryption Standard (DES)
  • Later ciphers such as Blowfish and Twofish

Links

Sources✓ verified 2026-09-28