Anubis is a block cipher designed by Vincent Rijmen and Paulo S. L. M. Barreto as an entrant in the NESSIE project, a former research program initiated by the European Commission in 2000 for the identification of new cryptographic algorithms.
[1] Although the cipher has not been included in the final NESSIE portfolio, its design is considered very strong, and no attacks have been found by 2004 after the project had been concluded.
This allows low-cost hardware and compact software implementations to use the same operations for both encryption and decryption.
[1] Nonetheless, because of the cipher's similarity with Rijndael it was not considered to offer any convincing advantages and thus was not included in the second evaluation phase of the NESSIE project.
Anubis is named after the Egyptian god of entombing and embalming, which the designers interpreted to include encryption.