Moria (Middle-earth)

In the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, Moria was the name given at the beginning of the late Third Age to an enormous and by then very ancient underground complex in north-western Middle-earth, comprising a vast network of tunnels, chambers, mines and huge halls or mansions, that ran under and ultimately through the Misty Mountains.

There, for many thousands of years prior to that time, had lived the Dwarf clan known as the Longbeards. Moria's original name, that given it by the dwarves in their own language, was Khazad-dûm, which translates as The Dwarrow Delf, "dwarrows" being an archaic English plural of "dwarf", and "Delf" an archaic alternative to "Delving", from the verb "Delve", to dig.

Such was its size and fame that throughout its long history Khazad-dûm was well-known by many peoples of North-western Middle-Earth, who translated its name into their own languages; Hadhodrond (pronounced HATH-o-drond, with "th" as in this) by the Sindar, Casarrondo by the Noldor and Phurunargian in the Common Speech,

Dwarf (Middle-earth)

In the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, the Dwarves are a race inhabiting the world of Arda, a fictional prehistoric Earth which includes the continent Middle-earth.

They appear in his books The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), the posthumously published The Silmarillion (1977), Unfinished Tales (1980), and The History of Middle-earth series (1983–96), the last three edited by his son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien.

Development

The Book of Lost Tales

In The Book of Lost Tales the very few Dwarves who appear are portrayed as evil beings, employers of Orc mercenaries and in conflict with the Elves—who are the imagined "authors" of the myths, and are therefore biased against Dwarves. Tolkien was inspired by the dwarves of Norse myths and dwarves of Germanic folklore (such as those of the Brothers Grimm), from whom his Dwarves take their characteristic affinity with mining, metalworking, crafting and avarice.

The Hobbit

KHAZAD

In cryptography, KHAZAD /xɑːˈzɑːd/ is a block cipher designed by Paulo S. L. M. Barreto together with Vincent Rijmen, one of the designers of the Advanced Encryption Standard (Rijndael). KHAZAD is named after Khazad-dûm, the fictional dwarven realm in the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien (see also Khazad). KHAZAD was presented at the first NESSIE workshop in 2000, and, after some small changes, was selected as a finalist in the project.

KHAZAD has an eight-round substitution-permutation network structure similar to that of SHARK, a forerunner to Rijndael. The design is classed as a "legacy-level" algorithm, with a 64-bit block size (in common with older ciphers such as DES and IDEA) and a 128-bit key. KHAZAD makes heavy use of involutions as subcomponents; this minimises the difference between the algorithms for encryption and decryption.

The authors have stated that, "KHAZAD is not (and will never be) patented. It may be used free of charge for any purpose."

Frédéric Muller has discovered an attack which can break five of KHAZAD's eight rounds. No attacks better than this are known as of August 2009.