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Products that use
Blowfish - Block Cipher
Speed Comparison
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Blowfish is a symmetric block cipher that can be used as a drop-in replacement for DES or IDEA. It takes a variable-length key, from 32 bits to 448 bits, making it ideal for both domestic and exportable use. Blowfish was designed in 1993 by Bruce Schneier as a fast, free alternative to existing encryption algorithms. Since then it has been analyzed considerably, and it is slowly gaining acceptance as a strong encryption algorithm. Blowfish is unpatented and license-free, and is available free for all uses.
The original Blowfish paper was presented at the First Fast Software Encryption workshop in Cambridge, UK (proceedings published by Springer-Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science #809, 1994) and the April 1994 issue of Dr. Dobbs Journal. "Blowfish--One Year Later" appeared in the September 1995 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal.
Many cryptographers have examined Blowfish, although there are few published results. Serge Vaudenay examined weak keys in Blowfish; there are a class of keys that can be detected--although not broken--in Blowfish variants of 14 rounds or less. There is also an unpublished differential attack that penetrates 3 rounds of the algorithm.
Everyone is welcome to download Blowfish and use it in their application. There are no rules about use, although I would appreciate being notified of any commercial applications using the product so that I can list them on this website. Of course, the U.S. government will not allow Blowfish implementations to be exported. (You may have some luck with a crippled 40-bit version).
Sites that have free Blowfish source code available for download include ftp.replay.com (Netherlands), ftp.ox.ac.uk (UK). and scss3.cl.msu.edu (US residents only) and ftp.csn.net (US and Canada residents only).
Test vectors so that you can test your own implementation are available on this site.
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