Which Encryption Method Can Support a 448-bit Encryption Key and Its Derivative Nearly Became AES? Blowfish
Bruce Schneier is a legend in Cybersecurity… possibly one of the most influential people in the industry. He mainly writes books and lectures these days, but at one time he created symmetric key encryption methods. The most famous of these is the Blowfish method. Like DES and 3DES, it uses a 64-bit block size (8 bytes), but unlike DES, it is unpatented [1]:
Overall it uses 16 Feistel-like iterations, and where the data input from the 64-bit block is split into two 32-bit words. An important strength of the method is that it can support key sizes up to 448 bits (56 bytes):
The Feistel cipher applies a symmetric key infrastructure and was named after Horst Feistel (IBM). It uses essentially the same encryption and decryption process, and where the key application is just reversed. The basic structure is given below and where we split the input data into blocks. Each block is then split into two (left and…
