Week 8 Blog - Blowfish - Data Encryption

This week, I am going to talk about another popular and powerful way that financial institution often uses to encrypt the cyber data.  Blowfish is a method that designed to replace the Data Encryption Standard (DES).  It was developed by Bruce Schneier in 1993.  Blowfish has a 64-bit block size and a variable key length from 32 bits up to 448 bits.  It has a 16-round block cipher and uses the large symmetric key algorithms.

Blowfish used the idea of splitting the data into many blocks of 64 bits and encrypting each of them separately.  This algorithm would make Blowfish more secure and this has been one of the best data encryptions that has no effective cryptanalysis until now.

With Blowfish method, it gains couple strong key features below:

1   1.   More secure

     2.  Performance

3   3.  Free

With those three main features above, Blowfish is widely used in e-commerce for securing payments and password management.  However, there are some cons about Blowfish.  As mentioned above, Blowfish is fast block cipher but when we must change the keys for the encryption, each key requires some pre-processing that slow down the process.  Also, Blowfish has a memory footprint of 4KB of RAM.  Even though this is a very small memory but it might affect some small embedded system.  Last, Blowfish use only 64-bit block size, which is still relatively short that would have some security holes.  Therefore, a Twofish algorithm had come out, which used 128 bits with a key size up to 256 bit that really made Twofish secure.

Reference:

StorageCraft Technology Corporation. (2017).  5 Common Encryption Algorithms and the Unbreakables of the Future.  Retrieved from https://www.storagecraft.com/blog/5-common-encryption-algorithms

Wikipedia. Blowfish (cipher).  Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowfish_%28cipher%29

Wikipedia. Twofish.  Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twofish