The RIPEMD-160 secure hash function may be best known these days for its role as part of the implementation of Bitcoin. I’ve wondered what “RIPEMD” stands for, and today I stumbled on an explanation [1]:
“RIPEMD” stands for “RIPE Message Digest,” where “RIPE” stands for “RACE Integrity Primitives Evaluation” and where “RACE” stands for “Research and Development in Advanced Communications Technologies in Europe”—a nice example of a recursive abbreviation.
This deserves a diagram:
I created the diagram above with DITAA.
Related posts
[1] Introduction to Cryptography with Open-Source Software by Alasdair McAndrew. CRC Press. 2011
And of course ‘bit’ is an abbreviation too, even if it’s not an acronym. And one could argue about ‘160’… :-)
I couldn’t resist traversing and flattening the tree. It’s “Research and Development in Advanced Communications Technologies in Europe Integrity Primitives Evaluation Message Digest”.
Which I assume the Germans render as a single word.
Chirp from the peanut gallery:
Isn’t this more “iteration“ than “recursion“?
Recursion: it calls itself (e.g. GNU)
Iteration: it repeatedly calls some function (here, expansion)
/endchirp
Definitely not recursive abbreviation, just chained.