The statement 'A DES key is 40 bits long' is

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Multiple Choice

The statement 'A DES key is 40 bits long' is

Explanation:
DES uses 56 bits of actual key material to control its operations, even though a DES key is often stored as 64 bits with one parity bit in each byte. Those parity bits are for error checking and don’t contribute to the secret, so the effective key length is 56 bits. Saying a DES key is 40 bits long is not correct for standard DES. (There were historical export variants that used shorter keys, but that’s not the typical DES key size.)

DES uses 56 bits of actual key material to control its operations, even though a DES key is often stored as 64 bits with one parity bit in each byte. Those parity bits are for error checking and don’t contribute to the secret, so the effective key length is 56 bits. Saying a DES key is 40 bits long is not correct for standard DES. (There were historical export variants that used shorter keys, but that’s not the typical DES key size.)

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