The
American National Bureau of Standards was looking for a standard encryption system in the mid
70s. Lucifer, was an encryption system released by
IBM developed by:
On a side note:
Horst Feistel frequently found himself in trouble with the
NSA as he tried to perform research and development in
Cryptography largely because he was a
German immigrant, but also because the NSA didn't like other people working on
cryptology period. At IBM's
Thomas J. Watson Laboratory he was able to conduct his research for several years without problem.
Lucifer works on binary information, encrypting blocks of 64 bits at a time. Each block is encrypted seperately, being split in two, and then fed through through 16 'rounds'. A 'round' is described as:
L0 (the first half block) and R0 (the second half block). R0 is mangled. The mangled 32-bit block is added to L0 creating R1. The original R0 becomes L1.
L
1 and R
1 are the inputs to the second round creating L
2 and R
2 and so on until 16 rounds have been completed. The result of the 16 the round is the encrypted Lucifer block.
Source The Code Book and delta's writeup on DES. Check delta's writeup to see what happened to Lucifer once the NSA got ahold of it.