MARS

:''This article is about the block cipher. For MARS (Molecular Adsorbents Recirculation System), see liver dialysis. For the album by Gackt, see MARS (album). For MARS (Memory Array Redcode Simulator), see Core War.In cryptography, MARS is a block cipher which was IBM's submission to the Advanced Encryption Standard process (AES). MARS was selected as a finalist. The design team included Don Coppersmith who had been involved in the creation of the previous Data Encryption Standard (DES) twenty years earlier.

MARS has a 128-bit block size and a variable key size of between 128 and 448 bits (in 32-bit increments). Unlike most block ciphers, MARS has a heterogeneous structure: several rounds of a cryptographic core are "jacketed" by unkeyed mixing rounds.

External links

* IBM's page on MARS
* SCAN's entry on MARS
* John Savard's description of MARS