A Cryptography Primer 55 featured the Unix clock, Alan Shepherd on the moon, the U.S. Bicentennial, the civil rights movement, women's liberation, Robert Heinlein's sci-fi classic, Stranger in a Strange Land, and, most important to this chapter, modern cryptography. The late 1960s and early 1970s changed the face of the modern world at breakneck speed. Modern warfare reached tentative heights with radio-guided missiles, and warfare needed a new hero. And then there was the Data Encryption Standard, or DES; in a sense DES was the turning point for cryptography in that, for the first time, it fully leveraged the power of modern computing in its algorithms. The sky appeared to be the limit, but, unfortunately for those who wanted to keep their information secure, decryption techniques were not far behind. Data Encryption Standard In the mid-1970s the U.S. government issued a public specification, through its National Bureau of Standards (NBS), called the Data Encryption Standard or, most commonly, DES. This could perhaps be considered the dawn of modern cryptography because it was very likely the first block cipher, or at least its first widespread implementation. But the 1970s were a relatively untrusting time. "Big Brother" loomed right around the corner (as per George Orwell's 1984), and the majority of people didn't understand or necessarily trust DES. Issued under the NBS, now called the National Institute of Standards and Technology