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