IDEA
IDEA can refer to two important terms in the e-commerce world. The International Data Encryption Algorithm (IDEA) is a block cipher first developed in 1991. The cipher was designed to replace the older Data Encryption Standard (DES), which was selected by the National Bureau of Standards as an official Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) in 1976. DES was a symmetric-key algorithm with a 56-bit key and a 64-bit blockit’s small size makes it easy to break. In contrast, IDEA operates on a 128-bit key, still with a 64-bit block. It was designed by James Massey of ETH Zurich in collaboration with Xueijia Lai. The cipher has a series of eight identical transformations, known as a round, and an output transformation, known as a half-round. IDEA’s security strengths come from the fact that it combines operations from three different groups: bitwise eXclusive OR, addition modulo 216, and multiplication modulo 2161. IDEA was originally very popular, due to its strength against differential cryptanalysis, but did not replace the DES. That honor has gone to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), developed in 1998. A successor to IDEA, IDEA NXT (originally FOX), was released in 2003. This cipher is currently patent pending. Ciphers are used to encrypt the confidential information that your business uses everyday. Whether you use IDEA, IDEA NXT, AES, or another standard, make sure that you’re doing all you can to protect your company’s confidentialityand that of your customers. IDEA is also the name of an e-commerce organization partnered with the National Association of Electrical Distributors (NAED). According to the NAED website, “IDEA is the official eCommerce standards creating and setting body for the electrical industry and those same standards translate to other industries.”