In cryptography, the Iraqi block cipher was a block cipher published in C source code form by anonymous FTP upload around July 1999, and widely distributed on Usenet. It is a five round unbalanced Feistel cipher operating on a 256 bit block with a 160 bit key.
A comment suggests that it is of Iraqi origin. However, like the S-1 block cipher, it is generally regarded as a hoax, although of lesser quality than S-1. Although the comment suggests that it is Iraqi in origin, all comments, variable and function names and printed strings are in English rather than Arabic; the code is fairly inefficient (including some pointless operations), and the cipher's security may be flawed (no proof).
Because it has a constant key schedule the cipher is vulnerable to a slide attack. However, it may take 264 chosen texts to create a single slid pair, which would make the attack unfeasible. It also has many fixed points, although that is not necessarily a problem, except possibly for hashing modes. No public attack is currently available. As with S-1, it was David Wagner who first spotted the security flaws.[1]
References
- ^ David A. Wagner (2000-05-08). "Re: Question about iraqi block cipher". Newsgroup: sci.crypt. Usenet: 8f75u3$jvl$1@blowfish.isaac.cs.berkeley.edu. Retrieved 2008-08-20.
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