The exchange of sensitive information is a constant of twenty-
first century life. We withdraw cash from ATMs, make purchases
with credit and debit cards, shop online, send and receive
emails, and conduct business on smartphones. Cryptography helps
to keep all of that data private and secure. In the late 1960s,
IBM Chairman Thomas J. Watson Jr. set up a cryptography research
group in the Yorktown Heights, NY, laboratory, headed by
cryptographer Horst Feistel. The group created an encryption
method, named “Lucifer,” to protect the data for a cash-
dispensing system that IBM had developed for Lloyds Bank in the
United Kingdom. In 1971, Lloyds Bank bought the code, and IBM
worked to turn Lucifer into a commercial product. IBM’s work in
encryption came at an ideal time. In 1968, the US National
Bureau of Standards (NBS), started to study potential needs for
computer security for both civilians and the US government. The
results of the studies called for a single, interoperable data
encryption standard, and in May 1