Khafra

Khafra (also read as Khafre, Khefren and Chephren) was an ancient Egyptian king (pharaoh) of 4th dynasty during the Old Kingdom. He was the son of Khufu and the throne successor of Djedefre. According to the ancient historian Manetho Khafra was followed by king Bikheris, but according to archaeological evidences he was rather followed by king Menkaure. Khafra was the builder of the second largest pyramid of Giza. Some of the Egyptologists also credit him with the building of the Great Sphinx, but this is highly disputed. There is not much known about Khafra, except the historical reports of Herodotus, who describes him as a cruel and heretic ruler, who kept the Egyptian temples closed after Khufu had sealed them.

Family

Khafra was a son of king Khufu and the brother and successor of Djedefre. Khafra is thought by some to be the son of Queen Meritites I due to an inscription where he is said to honor her memory.

King's-wife, his beloved, Mertitytes; beloved of the Favorite of
the Two Goddesses; she who says anything whatsoever and it is done
for her. Great in the favor of Snefr[u] ; great in the favor
of Khuf[u] , devoted to Horus, honored under Khafre. Merti[tyt]es.[Breasted; Ancient Records]

Khafre (disambiguation)

The name Khafre can refer to:

Khufu and Khafre

In cryptography, Khufu and Khafre are two block ciphers designed by Ralph Merkle in 1989 while working at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. Along with Snefru, a cryptographic hash function, the ciphers were named after the Egyptian Pharaohs Khufu, Khafre and Sneferu.

Under a voluntary scheme, Xerox submitted Khufu and Khafre to the National Security Agency (NSA) prior to publication. NSA requested that Xerox not publish the algorithms, citing concerns about national security. Xerox, a large government contractor, complied. However, a reviewer of the paper passed a copy to John Gilmore, who made it available via the sci.crypt newsgroup. It would appear this was against Merkle's wishes. The scheme was subsequently published at the 1990 CRYPTO conference (Merkle, 1990).

Khufu and Khafre were patented by Xerox; issued on March 26, 1991.

Khufu

Khufu is a 64-bit block cipher which, unusually, uses keys of size 512 bits; block ciphers typically have much smaller keys, rarely exceeding 256 bits. Most of the key material is used to construct the cipher's S-boxes. Because the key-setup time is quite time consuming, Khufu is not well suited to situations in which many small messages are handled. It is better suited to bulk encryption of large amounts of data.