Blowfish is a 64-bit block cipher designed by renowned cryptography expert Bruce Schneier. It was designed as part of the open contest to find a replacement for the [DES] cipher. This contest eventually chose to use the [Rjindael] algorithm and renamed it [AES] but blowfish remains a popular choice for some applications. It is designed to operate efficiently on 32bit architectures and accepts variable key lengths. In practice initializing the cipher is a slow operation but once initialized the cipher operates very quickly.

The blowfish crypto algorithm has a homepage at [http://www.counterpane.com/blowfish.html].

A pure-Tcl implementation is included as part of [tcllib] (the original is on this wiki at [Blowfish in Tcl]).

Other Tcl packages with blowfish implementations are:

   * [Trfcrypt]
   * [Critlib] [http://www.equi4.com/critlib/]

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See also [BOOK: Applied Cryptography]

[[[Category Cryptography]]]