Triple DES

In cryptography, Triple DES (3DES or TDES), officially the Triple Data Encryption Algorithm (TDEA or Triple DEA), is a symmetric-key block cipher, which applies the Data Encryption Standard (DES) cipher algorithm three times to each data block. At the time of its development, the 56-bit key size of DES was increasingly considered inadequate against newer cryptanalysis techniques, and rapid growth in computer performance, as predicted by the Moore's law, made brute-force attacks increasingly possible and practical. Triple DES increases the effective key size to 112 bits. A CVE released in 2016, CVE-2016-2183, disclosed a major security vulnerability in the DES and 3DES encryption algorithms. This CVE, combined with the inadequate key size of 3DES, led to NIST deprecating 3DES in 2019 and disallowing all uses (except processing already encrypted data) by the end of 2023. It has been replaced with the more secure, more robust Advanced Encryption Standard, the AES. While US government and industry standards abbreviate the algorithm's name as TDES (Triple DES) and TDEA (Triple Data Encryption Algorithm), RFC 1851 referred to it as 3DES from the time it first promulgated the idea, and this namesake has since come into wide use by most vendors, users, and cryptographers.