Cryptography has a long and fascinating history. The proliferation of computers and communications systems in the 1960s brought with it a demand from the private sector for means to protect information in digital form and to provide security services.
Beginning with the work of Feistel at IBM in the early 1970s and culminating in 1977 with the adoption as a U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard for encrypting unclassified information, DES, the Data Encryption Standard, is the most well known cryptographic mechanism in history. In 1978 Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman discovered the first practical public-key encryption and signature scheme, now referred to as RSA. This application of a hard mathematical problem to cryptography revitalized efforts to find more efficient methods to factor.
The search for new public-key schemes, improvements to existing cryptographic mechanisms, and proofs of security continues at a rapid pace. Various standards and infrastructures involving cryptography are being put in place. Security products are being developed to address the security needs of an information intensive society.