What is IDEA?

IDEA :

              International Data Encryption Algorithm is an encryption algorithm developed at ETH in Zurich, Switzerland. It uses a block Cipher with a 128-bit key and is generally Considered to be very secure.It is considered among best publicly known algorithms. In the several years that it has been in use no practical attacks on it have been published despite of a number of attempts to find some. IDEA is patented in the United states and in most of the European Countries.IDEA uses 52 subkeys, each 16 bits long. THe plaintext block in IDEA is divided into four quaters.