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HCTR

Security På svenska → Updated: 2026-10-13

A wide-block mode with a hash on each side of a counter-mode core, designed for whole disk sectors.

HCTR was published in 2005 as a tweakable enciphering mode for variable-length input. It is built from a hash, a counter-mode pass and a second hash, so every output bit depends on every input bit of the sector. The tweak records where the block lives, so identical blocks in different places do not produce identical ciphertext.

HCTR2, from 2021, is the successor usually meant today and targets the same storage use. Both sit in the same family as EME and CMC: a cipher that scrambles an entire sector when one bit changes, without a separate authentication tag. Choosing between them is mostly a question of which implementation is already fast on your platform.

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