Khufu

Khufu (/ˈkuːfuː/ KOO-foo), originally Khnum-Khufu (/ˈknuːmˈkuːfuː/ KNOOM-koo-foo), is the birth name of a Fourth Dynasty ancient Egyptian pharaoh, who ruled in the first half of the Old Kingdom period (26th century BC). Khufu was the second pharaoh of the 4th dynasty; he followed his possible father, king Sneferu, on the throne. He is generally accepted as having commissioned the Great Pyramid of Giza, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, but many other aspects of his reign are rather poorly documented.

Khufu is well known under his Hellenized name Khêops or Cheops (/ˈkiːɒps/, KEE-ops; Greek: Χέοψ, by Diodorus and Herodotus) and less well known under another Hellenized name, Súphis (/ˈsuːfᵻs/ SOO-fis; Greek: Σοῦφις, by Manetho). A rare version of the name of Khufu, used by Josephus, is Sofe (/ˈsɒfiː/ SO-fe; Greek: Σοφε).Arab historians, who wrote mystic stories about Khufu and the Giza pyramids, called him Saurid or Salhuk.

The only completely preserved portrait of the king is a three-inch high ivory figurine found in a temple ruin of later period at Abydos in 1903. All other reliefs and statues were found in fragments and many buildings of Khufu are lost. Everything known about Khufu comes from inscriptions in his necropolis at Giza and later documents. For example, Khufu is the main actor of the famous Papyrus Westcar from the 13th dynasty.

Khufu (disambiguation)

The word Khufu 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.