This is my first question here, so if I ask it to the wrong group or otherwise infringing the (written or unwritten) rules of the community, please bear with me.
My problem is this: In an exercise in futility, I am trying to write a small program (in C) that implements the DES (FIPS 46-3) standard. I stumbled upon that part in which, from each byte in the 8 byte key, the LSB is used for (odd) parity checking, and eventually discarded.
That, I assume, means that a key like "aaaaaaac" (ASCII encoding) is invalid, since "c" (0x63) has even parity.
Now, either this is correct (and my question would be how commercial / publicly - available packages treat this, since I believe I saw plain ASCII used as key) OR it is a wrong train of thoughts, in which case I would like to know what I am missing.
Thanks a lot in advance.