Red Pike

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Red Pike is a classified United Kingdom government cipher, proposed for use by the National Health Service by GCHQ, but designed for a "broad range of applications in the British government" [1]. Little is publicly known about Red Pike, except that it is a block cipher with a 64-bit block size and 64-bit key length. According to the academic study of the cipher cited below and quoted in a paper by Ross Anderson and Markus Kuhn, it "uses the same basic operations as RC5" (add, XOR, and left shift) and "has no look-up tables, virtually no key schedule and requires only five lines of code"; "the influence of each key bit quickly cascades" and "each encryption involves of the order of 100 operations".

Thames Bridge and Rambutan are names of other classified UK ciphers; Rambutan is the most secret and Thames Bridge second-most.

[edit] See also

• Type 1 product

[edit] References

• C Mitchell, S Murphy, F Piper, P Wild. (1996). Red Pike — an assessment. Codes and Ciphers Ltd 2/10/96.
• Paper by Anderson and Kuhn which includes excerpts from (Mitchell et. al., 1996)
• "The use of encryption and related services with the NHSnet"

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