DES to AES

In the United States, data encryption began to be standardized commercially in the
1970s. IBM had a project called Lucifer based on a 56-bit key, and this became the basis
for the first generation of cipher standards known as Data Encryption Standard (DES).
DES became very outdated and insecure in the 1990s and was replaced with Triple
DES, an encrypt/decrypt/encrypt sequence using three different unrelated keys. At
present there is a new encryption standard being defined to replace DES known as
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).
AES is able to encrypt streaming audio and video in real time. In addition, it can fit
on a small 8-bit CPU (for example, on a smart card) and can be scaled up to work on
32-bit/64-bit CPUs for bulk data encryption. Key lengths are 128, 192, or 256 bit. It is
not designed to be particularly secure, but it is computationally expensive to deencrypt,
which means it confers sufficient distance to provide adequate commercial
protection without too much delay or processor overhead.