An Enhancement of Data Encryption Standards Algorithm (DES)

The Data Encryption Standard (DES) algorithm has been considered as the most popular symmetric key, blocks ciphering cryptographic. Even though the DES algorithm had still been used in some applications, it was considered unsafe because of the short key length (64 Bits), besides, the Brute force attack has shown that the DES practically can be attacked. In January 1999, the DES key was cracked in only (22 hours) and (15 minutes). The aim of this research is to improve the DES algorithm by increasing the key length (1024 bits) that is to be divided into 16 keys (64 bits each), each key is independently generated for the different algorithm cycles. The results of the proposed algorithm were much better than the old algorithm for detecting the encryption key or the total number of keys that could be generated by following Blind search method (try all possible keys), Increasing the key length (degree of complexity) makes it difficult to search in a vast space of numbers and attempts.