Block Sizes and Padding in A Most Amazing Machine

Do your eyes glaze over when someone mentions the size of encryption and the block size? Well, it’s important as the security of our data is dependent on the size of the key, and are data is encrypted within blocksize.

Many older encryption methods used a 64-bit block size, which meant that they would read in 8 characters (or eight 8-bit values) into a block and then encrypt that. Common methods that use these block sizes are DES and 3-DES. Most modern symmetric key methods, such as AES, use a 128-bit block size, which means we read in 16…