Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index

Pike (cryptography)

The Pike stream cipher was invented by Ross Anderson to be a "leaner and meaner" version of FISH after he broke FISH in 1994 (Of course it is a humorous allusion to the Pike (fish)). PIKE combined ideas from A5 with the Lagged Fibonacci generators used in FISH. It is about 10% faster than FISH, yet believed to be much stronger. It potentially has a huge key length, and in the nine years since publication there seem to have been no stronger attacks discovered.


"Red Pike" is also the name of a classified United Kingdom government cipher. Little is publicly known about Red Pike, except that it is a block cipher with a 64 bit block size and 64 bit key length, and internal operations similar to RC5.