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Khufu and Khafre

Security På svenska → Updated: 2026-10-11

Ralph Merkle's pair of block ciphers from Xerox, named after pharaohs and published despite the NSA asking nicely that they not be.

Merkle designed them at Xerox PARC around 1989 as faster alternatives to DES. Both use 64-bit blocks. Khufu derives its S-boxes from the key, which keeps them hidden from the attacker at the price of an expensive setup; Khafre uses fixed tables and suits situations where keys change often. Key-dependent tables reappeared a few years later in Blowfish.

Xerox filed for a patent, and the NSA asked the company not to publish the paper — a request Xerox, with government contracts to consider, agreed to. Someone who had a copy posted it to the sci.crypt newsgroup in 1989 anyway. Henri Gilbert and Pascal Chauvaud presented a differential attack on 16-round Khufu in 1994, though it needs an impractical amount of chosen plaintext.

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