DES, the Data Encryption Standard, was developed by IBM and the US government in the 1970's. Today, DES is considered to be weak and crackable, and a poor choice for anyone in the market for an encryption algorithm. However, many legacy protocols still use DES, so it's important to have implementations handy.

I recently found myself looking for a simple standalone DES implementation to study. Most of the open-source DES implementations are either highly optimized into obfuscation, or sloppily written. Either way, it's hard to find a clearly written and well-commented implementation suitable for educational purposes. I decided it would be a good exercise to write one myself. I wrote the implementation in Java, for the extra challenge of performing bit manipulations on signed primitive types. This implementation is undoubtedly very inefficient, but is well-commented and should be easy to understand for anyone who wants to dive into a sea of Feistel functions, S-boxes, variable rotations, and permutations.

References

I found the following resources useful in my study of DES:

• "Data Encryption Standard." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
• "The DES Algorithm Illustrated." J. Orlin Grabbe
• "DES Calculator." Lawrie Brown

Downloads

• DES.java - My DES implementation in Java