Akelarre - Definition and Overview

Akelarre is the Basque name ("meadow of the he-goat") of a place in Zugarramurdi (Navarre, Spain). It is famous for the meeting of witches. In Spanish language, aquelarre means "sabbath", a gathering of witches with the Devil.

Akelarre is a block cipher proposed in 1996, and combined features from IDEA and RC5. It was shown to be susceptible even to a ciphertext-only attack in 2000 (Knudsen and Rijmen, 2000).

Akelarre is a 128-bit block cipher with a variable key-length which must be some multiple of 64 bits. The number of rounds is variable, but four are suggested. The round function of Akelarre is similar to IDEA in structure.

References

• Lars Knudsen and Vincent Rijmen, Ciphertext-only Attack on Akelarre, Cryptologia, Vol. 24(2), April 2000, pp135–147.
• G. Álvarez Marañón, A. Fúster Sabater, D. Guía Martínez, F. Montoya Vitini y A. Peinado Domínguez, Akelarre: a New Block Cipher Algorithm, pp1–14, in proceedings of SAC'96, Third Annual Workshop on Selected Areas in Cryptography, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, 1996 [1] (http://www.iec.csic.es/~gonzalo/publis/papers/Akelarre.zip).
• Niels Ferguson and Bruce Schneier, Cryptanalysis of Akelarre, Fourth Annual Workshop on Selected Areas in Cryptography, August 1997, pp201–212 (PDF) (http://www.schneier.com/paper-akelarre.pdf).

Example Usage of Akelarre