History
Continued
®1933-1945: The Enigma
machine was taken over and improved upon to become the cryptographic workhorse of Nazi Germany.
®1976: A design by IBM
based on the Lucifer cipher and with changes by the US NSA, was
chosen to be the U.S. Data Encryption Standard. It has since found worldwide acceptance, largely because
it has shown itself
strong against 20 years of attacks. Even some who believe it is past its useful life use
it as a component -- e.g., of 3-key triple-DES.
®1991 Phil Zimmermann
released his first version of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) in response to
the threat by the FBI to demand access to the cleartext of the
communications of citizens. PGP offered high security to the general citizen
and as such could have been seen as a competitor to commercial products
like Mailsafe from RSADSI.