Lucifer (cipher)

In cryptography, Lucifer was the name given to several of the earliest civilian block ciphers, developed by Horst Feistel and his colleagues at IBM. Lucifer was a direct precursor to the Data Encryption Standard. One version, alternatively named DTD-1, saw commercial use in the 1970s for electronic banking.

Overview

LUCIFER uses a combination of Transposition and Substitution crypting as a starting point in decoding ciphers. One variant, described by Feistel in 1971, uses a 48-bit key and operates on 48-bit blocks. The cipher is a Substitution-permutation network and uses two 4-bit S-boxes. The key selects which S-boxes are used. The patent describes the execution of the cipher operating on 24-bits at a time, and also a sequential version operating on 8-bits at a time. Another variant by John L. Smith from the same year uses a 64-bit key operating on a 32-bit block, using one addition mod 4 and a singular 4-bit S-box. The construction is designed to operate on 4 bits per clock cycle. This may be one of the smallest block-cipher implementations known. Feistel later described a stronger variant that uses a 128-bit key and operates on 128-bit blocks.