Description
The Data Encryption Standard (DES) is an outdated form of encryption that became vulnerable to brute-force attacks, and was replaced by AES. Developed by IBM in the 1970s, it was used by the U.S. government as their official Federal Information Processing Standard and officially cycled out by 2005.
The reason DES was vulnerable to brute-force attacks is because decryption was simply the inverse of encryption and used a 64-bit key- reduced to a 54-bit key due to parity checks. Therefore, it only took 2^56 ( or 72,057,594,037,927,936) attempts to find the correct key used to encrypt a plaintext message.
Contributor
Michael Cobb, Laura Biasci, Lyne Granum, and Frank Rundatz