Editing History of cryptography (section)

===An encryption standard===
The mid-1970s saw two major public (i.e., non-secret) advances. First was the publication of the draft [[Data Encryption Standard]] in the U.S. ''Federal Register'' on 17 March 1975. The proposed DES cipher was submitted by a research group at [[International Business Machines|IBM]], at the invitation of the National Bureau of Standards (now [[NIST]]), in an effort to develop secure electronic communication facilities for businesses such as banks and other large financial organizations. After advice and modification by the [[NSA]], acting behind the scenes, it was adopted and published as a [[Federal Information Processing Standard]] Publication in 1977 (currently at [http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/fips46-3/fips46-3.pdf FIPS 46-3]). DES was the first publicly accessible cipher to be 'blessed' by a national agency such as the NSA. The release of its specification by NBS stimulated an explosion of public and academic interest in cryptography.

The aging DES was officially replaced by the [[Advanced Encryption Standard]] (AES) in 2001 when NIST announced FIPS 197. After an open competition, NIST selected [[Rijndael]], submitted by two Belgian cryptographers, to be the AES. DES, and more secure variants of it (such as [[Triple DES]]), are still used today, having been incorporated into many national and organizational standards. However, its 56-bit key-size has been shown to be insufficient to guard against [[brute force attack]]s (one such attack, undertaken by the cyber civil-rights group [[Electronic Frontier Foundation]] in 1997, succeeded in 56 hours.<ref>Electronic Frontier Foundation, ''Cracking DES'', O'Reilly, 1998.</ref>) As a result, use of straight DES encryption is now without doubt insecure for use in new cryptosystem designs, and messages protected by older cryptosystems using DES, and indeed all messages sent since 1976 using DES, are also at risk. Regardless of DES' inherent quality, the DES key size (56-bits) was thought to be too small by some even in 1976, perhaps most publicly by [[Whitfield Diffie]]. There was suspicion that government organizations even then had sufficient computing power to break DES messages; clearly others have achieved this capability.