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 a large number of 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.
Famous quotes containing the words iraqi, block and/or cipher:
“I will cut the head off my baby and swallow it if it will make Bush lose.”
—Zainab Ismael, Iraqi housewife. As quoted in Newsweek magazine, p. 31 (November 16, 1992)
“The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)
“It is not an arbitrary “decree of God,” but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow; for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By this veil, which curtains events, it instructs the children of men to live in to-day.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)