Panama ( ; ), officially called the Republic of Panama , is a country in Central America situated between North and South America. It is bordered by Costa Rica to the west, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south. The capital and largest city is Panama City, whose metropolitan area is home to nearly half of the country's 3.9 million people.

Panama is a cryptography primitive which can be used both as a hash function and a stream cipher. Based on StepRightUp, it was designed by Joan Daemen and Craig Clapp and presented in the paper Fast Hashing and Stream Encryption with PANAMA on the Fast Software Encryption (FSE) conference 1998. The cipher has influenced several other designs, for example MUGI and SHA-3.