Editing Red Pike (cipher) (section)

{{Short description|Block cipher}}
'''Red Pike''' is a [[classified information|classified]] [[United Kingdom]] government encryption algorithm, proposed for use by the [[National Health Service]] by [[GCHQ]], but designed for a "broad range of applications in the [[Her Majesty's Government|British government]]" [http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/rja/GCHQ/25_2_97.htm] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20040423194646/http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/rja/GCHQ/25_2_97.htm |date=2004-04-23 }}. Little is publicly known about Red Pike, except that it is a [[block cipher]] with a 64-bit [[block size (cryptography)|block size]] and 64-bit [[key length]].  According to the academic study of the cipher cited below and quoted in a paper by [[Ross J. Anderson|Ross Anderson]] and [[Markus Kuhn (computer scientist)|Markus Kuhn]], it "uses the same basic operations as [[RC5 encryption algorithm|RC5]]" (add, XOR, and left shift) and "has no look-up tables, virtually no key schedule and requires only five lines of code"; "the influence of each key bit quickly cascades" and "each encryption involves of the order of 100 operations". 64 bits of key entropy are not considered secure anymore.

Red Pike is available to approved British government contractors in software form, for use in confidential (not secret) government communication systems. GCHQ also designed the [[Rambutan (cryptography)|Rambutan]] cryptosystem for the same segment.

Given that Red Pike is a British encryption algorithm, its name likely refers to a particular [[Red Pike (Buttermere)|fell in the western English Lake District]].