Horst Feistel

Horst Feistel (30 January 1915⁽¹⁾–14 November 1990) was a cryptographer who worked on the design of ciphers at IBM, initiating research that would culminate in the development of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) in the 1970s.

Life and work

Feistel was born in Berlin in 1915, and moved to the United States in 1934. During World War II, he was placed under house arrest, but nevertheless gained U.S. citizenship on 31 January 1944. The following day he was granted a security clearance and began work for the U.S. 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. Finally, he moved to IBM, where he received an award for his cryptographic work. 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.

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.

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. [http://www3.edgenet.net/dcowley/docs.html (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. "", 2001.

External links

* [http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/bio.feistel.html Short Biography and Photo (Provided by IBM)]
* [http://www.feistel.org/subtree/state_ma.htm Genealogical notes for Horst Feistel]

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.