3 Blowfish is a block cipher that operates on 64bit (8 byte) quantities. It
4 uses variable size key, but 128bit (16 byte) key would normally be considered
5 good. It can be used in all the modes that DES can be used. This
6 library implements the ecb, cbc, cfb64, ofb64 modes.
8 Blowfish is quite a bit faster that DES, and much faster than IDEA or
9 RC2. It is one of the faster block ciphers.
11 For all calls that have an 'input' and 'output' variables, they can be the
14 This library requires the inclusion of 'blowfish.h'.
16 All of the encryption functions take what is called an BF_KEY as an
17 argument. An BF_KEY is an expanded form of the Blowfish key.
18 For all modes of the Blowfish algorithm, the BF_KEY used for
19 decryption is the same one that was used for encryption.
21 The define BF_ENCRYPT is passed to specify encryption for the functions
22 that require an encryption/decryption flag. BF_DECRYPT is passed to
25 Please note that any of the encryption modes specified in my DES library
26 could be used with Blowfish. I have only implemented ecb, cbc, cfb64 and
27 ofb64 for the following reasons.
28 - ecb is the basic Blowfish encryption.
29 - cbc is the normal 'chaining' form for block ciphers.
30 - cfb64 can be used to encrypt single characters, therefore input and output
31 do not need to be a multiple of 8.
32 - ofb64 is similar to cfb64 but is more like a stream cipher, not as
33 secure (not cipher feedback) but it does not have an encrypt/decrypt mode.
34 - If you want triple Blowfish, thats 384 bits of key and you must be totally
35 obsessed with security. Still, if you want it, it is simple enough to
36 copy the function from the DES library and change the des_encrypt to
37 BF_encrypt; an exercise left for the paranoid reader :-).
39 The functions are as follows:
45 BF_set_key converts an 'len' byte key into a BF_KEY.
46 A 'ks' is an expanded form of the 'key' which is used to
47 perform actual encryption. It can be regenerated from the Blowfish key
48 so it only needs to be kept when encryption or decryption is about
49 to occur. Don't save or pass around BF_KEY's since they
50 are CPU architecture dependent, 'key's are not. Blowfish is an
51 interesting cipher in that it can be used with a variable length
52 key. 'len' is the length of 'key' to be used as the key.
53 A 'len' of 16 is recomended by me, but blowfish can use upto
54 72 bytes. As a warning, blowfish has a very very slow set_key
55 function, it actually runs BF_encrypt 521 times.
57 void BF_encrypt(unsigned long *data, BF_KEY *key);
58 void BF_decrypt(unsigned long *data, BF_KEY *key);
59 These are the Blowfish encryption function that gets called by just
60 about every other Blowfish routine in the library. You should not
61 use this function except to implement 'modes' of Blowfish.
62 I say this because the
63 functions that call this routine do the conversion from 'char *' to
64 long, and this needs to be done to make sure 'non-aligned' memory
66 Data is a pointer to 2 unsigned long's and key is the
74 This is the basic Electronic Code Book form of Blowfish (in DES this
75 mode is called Electronic Code Book so I'm going to use the term
77 Input is encrypted into output using the key represented by
78 key. Depending on the encrypt, encryption or
79 decryption occurs. Input is 8 bytes long and output is 8 bytes.
88 This routine implements Blowfish in Cipher Block Chaining mode.
89 Input, which should be a multiple of 8 bytes is encrypted
90 (or decrypted) to output which will also be a multiple of 8 bytes.
91 The number of bytes is in length (and from what I've said above,
92 should be a multiple of 8). If length is not a multiple of 8, bad
93 things will probably happen. ivec is the initialisation vector.
94 This function updates iv after each call so that it can be passed to
95 the next call to BF_cbc_encrypt().
97 void BF_cfb64_encrypt(
105 This is one of the more useful functions in this Blowfish library, it
106 implements CFB mode of Blowfish with 64bit feedback.
107 This allows you to encrypt an arbitrary number of bytes,
108 you do not require 8 byte padding. Each call to this
109 routine will encrypt the input bytes to output and then update ivec
110 and num. Num contains 'how far' we are though ivec.
111 'Encrypt' is used to indicate encryption or decryption.
112 CFB64 mode operates by using the cipher to generate a stream
113 of bytes which is used to encrypt the plain text.
114 The cipher text is then encrypted to generate the next 64 bits to
115 be xored (incrementally) with the next 64 bits of plain
116 text. As can be seen from this, to encrypt or decrypt,
117 the same 'cipher stream' needs to be generated but the way the next
118 block of data is gathered for encryption is different for
119 encryption and decryption.
121 void BF_ofb64_encrypt(
128 This functions implements OFB mode of Blowfish with 64bit feedback.
129 This allows you to encrypt an arbitrary number of bytes,
130 you do not require 8 byte padding. Each call to this
131 routine will encrypt the input bytes to output and then update ivec
132 and num. Num contains 'how far' we are though ivec.
133 This is in effect a stream cipher, there is no encryption or
136 For reading passwords, I suggest using des_read_pw_string() from my DES library.
137 To generate a password from a text string, I suggest using MD5 (or MD2) to
138 produce a 16 byte message digest that can then be passed directly to
142 For more information about the specific Blowfish modes in this library
143 (ecb, cbc, cfb and ofb), read the section entitled 'Modes of DES' from the
144 documentation on my DES library. What is said about DES is directly
145 applicable for Blowfish.