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Snefru is a cryptographic hash function invented byRalph Merkle which supports 128-bit and 256-bit output.It was named after the Egyptian PharaohSneferu, continuing the tradition of the Khufu andKhafre block ciphers.
The original design of Snefru was shown to be insecure by Eli Biham andAdi Shamir who were able to use differential cryptanalysisto find hash collisions. The design was then modified by increasing the number of iterations of the main pass of the algorithm from twoto eight. Although differential cryptanalysis can break the revised version with less complexity thanbrute force search (a certificational weakness), the attack requires288.5 operations and is thus not currently feasible in practice.