High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In cryptography, CDMF (Commercial Data Masking Facility) is an algorithm developed at IBM in 1992 to reduce the security strength of the 56-bit DES cipher to that of 40-bit encryption, at the time a requirement of U.S. restrictions on export of cryptography. Rather than a separate cipher from DES, CDMF constitutes a key generation algorithm, called key shortening. It is one of the cryptographic algorithms supported by S-HTTP.