Horst Feistel

Horst Feistel (January 30, 1915^[1] – November 14, 1990) was a German-American cryptographer who worked on the design of ciphers at IBM, initiating research that culminated in the development of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) in the 1970s. The structure used in DES, called a Feistel network, is commonly used in many block ciphers.^[2][3][4]

Horst Feistel
Born	(1915-01-30)January 30, 1915 Berlin, Germany
Died	November 14, 1990(1990-11-14) (aged 75)
Alma mater	MIT Harvard University
Known for	Feistel cipher

Life and work

Feistel was born in Berlin, Germany in 1915, and moved to the United States in 1934. During World War II, he was placed under house arrest, but gained US citizenship on 31 January 1944. The following day he was granted a security clearance and began work for the US Air Force Cambridge Research Center (AFCRC) on Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) devices until the 1950s. He was subsequently employed at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, then the MITRE corporation. In 1968, Feistel became a Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J Watson Center.^[5] During his time there he received an award for his cryptographic work. In 1971, he patented the block cipher cryptographic system at IBM.^[5] His research at IBM led to the development of the Lucifer and Data Encryption Standard (DES) ciphers. Feistel was one of the earliest non-government researchers to study the design and theory of block ciphers.

Feistel lent his name to the Feistel network construction, a common method for constructing block ciphers (for example DES).

Feistel obtained a bachelor's degree at MIT, and his master's at Harvard, both in physics. He married Leona (Gage) in 1945, with whom he had a daughter, Peggy.

Notes

1. Both (Diffie and Landau, 1998), and (Levy, 2001) give Feistel's birth year as 1914. The dates included here are based on the genealogical notes.
2. "Block ciphers" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-11-25.
3. "On Generalized Feistel networks" (PDF).
4. "Feistel networks" (PDF).
5. Konheim, Alan G. (2019). "Horst Feistel: the inventor of LUCIFER, the cryptographic algorithm that changed cryptology". Journal of Cryptographic Engineering. 9 (1): 85–100. doi:10.1007/s13389-018-0198-5. ISSN 2190-8508.

References

• Whitfield Diffie, Susan Landau (1998). Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption.
• Horst Feistel, "Cryptography and Computer Privacy." Scientific American, Vol. 228, No. 5, 1973. (JPEG format scanned)
• Horst Feistel, H, W. Notz, J. Lynn Smith. "Some cryptographic techniques for machine-to-machine data communications." IEEE Proceedings, 63(11), 1545–1554, 1975.
• Levy, Steven. Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government—Saving Privacy in the Digital Age, 2001.

External links

• "Genealogical notes for Horst Feistel". Archived from the original on 2016-03-04.
• In praise of the Feistel network - MIT Technology Review