analysing cryptographic algorithms, potentially uncovering weaknesses in them (e.g. "breaking" them or casting doubts on their actual security)

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Can two cipher letters per plaintext letter easily defeat character frequency analysis?

For a class 5 years ago I wrote a paper about defeating character frequency analysis by using two cipher letters per plaintext letter. I didn't get much feedback from the professor so I wonder if ...
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112 views

Security strength of RSA in relation with the modulus size

NIST SP 800-57 §5.6.1 p.62–64 specifies a correspondence between RSA modulus size $n$ and expected security strength $s$ in bits: ...
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43 views

differential and linear cryptanalysis

I have been reading about differential and linear cryptanalysis. They were mainly introduced by Adi Shamir and Biham to show weakness of DES. However, many of articles state that they have been ...
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88 views

How insecure in practice?

I am in attempt to understand relative insecurity of certain encryption schemes. Particularly of interest is DES and RC2. I know AES is better and should be used to encrypt. But practically, if ...
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343 views

Why are bitwise rotations used in cryptography?

Any understanding I have of cryptography stops right around the cipher level. As such, I'm just curious as to why bit shifts and moreover circular bit shift are so prevalent in cryptography.
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158 views

What do recent announcements about solving the DLP in $GF(2^{6120})$ mean for RSA

After just reading the post Do recent announcements about solving the DLP in $GF(2^{6120})$ apply to schemes proposed for cryptographic use? I was a bit confused. DSA, ElGamal and others are based on ...
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186 views

Do recent announcements about solving the DLP in $GF(2^{6120})$ apply to schemes proposed for cryptographic use?

A recent paper by Göloğlu, Granger, McGuire, and Zumbrägel: Solving a 6120-bit DLP on a Desktop Computer seems to "demonstrate a practical DLP break in the finite field of $2^{6120}$ elements, using ...
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615 views

Recommended skills for a job in cryptology

First let me apologize if this is an ill posed question. Let me also note that I do not in any way seek a comprehensive answer, simply your thoughts on what makes for a valuable asset to a company ...
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130 views

Are there any hand ciphers not obsoleted by computer cryptanalysis?

Computerized cryptanalysis has obviously made formerly "secure" hand ciphers like Playfair, Four Square, and the Hill Cipher obsolete because they can be defeated in seconds. But is there a hand ...
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135 views

Hill-cipher, disordered alphabet

I am going to apply a simple substitution cipher to my input, then encrypt the result with a Hill cipher. How can this be broken, in a chosen-plaintext threat model? In other words, instead of the ...
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145 views

Help me describe/identify this challenge-response protocol/algorithm?

My area of expertise is reverse engineering, specifically embedded systems. I do attack cryptographic systems, but this largely involves key recovery or exploiting the implementation. I was asked to ...
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175 views

Using an MD5 hash as a password

Suppose Alice is using a password prompt that only accepts up to 32 characters for any particular password. Memorization of long strings of random characters is not one of Alice's strengths, so she ...
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Security of Salsa20 with some known plaintext?

Basic question- if I'm encoding a bunch of known filetypes with salsa20, will it still be secure if the plaintext header is known? Assume that a different IV and Key are generated before each file is ...
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449 views

repeating-key xor and hamming distance

I read that to break repeating-key xor you can do the following: try a keysize $n$ and compute the hamming distance between the first $n$ bits of the encrypted string and the bits $n+1$ to $2n$ of the ...
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178 views

Is it possible to work out the hash algorithm from a list of known message-hash pairs?

For example, in my situation I know hash(20) = 486e9638177faf1f34e49910491b77af. I also know the hashes for all values from 0 to 20. Is it possible to work out the ...
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99 views

decryption many time pad

I have eleven ciphertexts that were encrypted with the same key (which I don't know). I want to decrypt the last ciphertext. I read similar question like Many time pad attack but I can't solve my ...
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54 views

Comprehension question on a signature protocol based on the RSA assumption

We have the following two-party protocol between Alice and Bob. Alice sends messages $m_1, m_2, \ldots \in_R \mathbb{Z}_n^*$ to Bob and Bob signs these values by calculating $v_1, v_2, \ldots \in_R ...
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73 views

What does “adaptively secure” mean?

In a paper it says "In the generic group model, the PRF is adaptively secure for inputs of $\mathbb{Z}_q^n$". Maybe a stupid question, but what does "adaptively secure" mean exactly?
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MD4 First preimage - state of the art

What's the state of the attack to get the first preimage on MD4? Is it still this http://www.di.ens.fr/~leurent/files/MD4_FSE08.pdf in 2^102 ?
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58 views

Why constrain the message lengths in indistinguishability in the presence of an eavesdropper?

I need your help with a very basic concept in cryptography which I can't understand/prove on my own. I'm trying to prove and understand why, under "indistinguishability in the presence of an ...
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164 views

Understanding one-way hash functions construction

I understand the needs that lead to the development of cryptography and I am quite familiar with the uses we make of the cryptographic tools. But, as a programmer, I am conditioned to see them as ...
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104 views

How to design a practical and secure MAC scheme?

I am sorry, but I need to introduce some concepts which are not directly related to cryptography to make myself clear, I hope I won't stun you with this ... (I'd rather explain it here than redirect ...
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180 views

What is the probability of breaking the AES algorithm?

I am doing a project which requires the encryption to be done using AES. Is it really possible (technically) to crack AES? If yes, please tell me: What is the probability of breaking AES? How ...
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336 views

Where can I begin to study the math behind modern cryptography?

I've been studying (more like breathing and eating) crypto for almost a year now, implementing algorithms, reading books, studying code, etc. The deeper I go in, the more I realize there is; I feel ...
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165 views

How would one crack a weak but unknown encryption protocol?

I asked a question on security.stackexchange, but was told it would be a better fit here: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/32779/how-would-one-crack-a-weak-but-unknown-encryption-protocol ...
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63 views

Efficient algorithm for remainder calculation over prime field for ECC implementation?

I am working on 224-bit elliptic curve cryptography. In this 224-bit * 224-bit multiplication results 448-bit output. I am reducing 448-bit into prime field range( prime number $2^{224}-2^{96}+1$) ...
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57 views

What is total key space in transposition algorithms

How we can measure key space in transposition algorithms? Should we specify the method, like rail fence ?
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126 views

Understanding a Blowfish cryptanalysis

I'm reading a cryptanalysis on Blowfish, and I've come across something that I don't quite get. Let's denote $$\delta = a \oplus a'$$ where a and a' are bytes that cause a collision in some S-box ...
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Security of tokenization of plain text conversations - cryptanalysis

I came across a marketing video here. They claim to perform AES encryption and tokenization of sensitive data, at the corporate gateway, before it leaves the company firewall destined for the public ...
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Strength of Combining Hash functions [duplicate]

If I combine two hash functions, what will the impact on the strength of the resulting function. If I combine in following way: H1*H2 (multiply) H1 + H2 (concat) H1 Xor H2 H1 (H2) EDIT: Lets say H1 ...
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140 views

Possibility of factorisation of rsa modulus due to vulnerability in java implementation code

Below is my implementation of the RSA algorithm. Actually I'm choosing the private key (d) instead of public key (e) and computing the public key.It is working fine but I want to know if this is a ...
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108 views

How to solve the reverse of an equation that uses MOD?

I've been tasked with reverse engineering an unknown crypto function. The function uses the following constants: $a=380951$: I noticed that this is a prime number $b=3182$: I noted that this is a ...
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148 views

Question about why RSA is hard to attack

I think I understand why RSA is hard to attack but I'd like to get clarification if I actually do. Assume there are two people, Alice and Bob, who are attempting to communicate privately but that we ...
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106 views

Chosen Plaintext Attacks

Assuming the ability to launch Chosen Plaintext Attacks (CPA), how many oracle calls an attacker needs to break the affine cipher? and how
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189 views

Berlekamp-Massey algorithm: case when sequence length is less than double the length of the LFSR

Suppose that we have a sequence of $N$ digits which is produced by a Linear Feedback Shift Register (LFSR) and the shortest such LFSR is of length $L$. A very important tool in cryptanalysis of stream ...
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101 views

ASCII Message in TV show? [closed]

So I was watching a popular series tonight (Person Of Interest) when suddenly during a frame change I noticed a very quick blue screen with writing. At the time I never thought anything of it as it ...
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96 views

Measuring Shannon's diffusion

Shannon's idea of diffusion is fundamental to cryptography. Besides being a descriptive idea, is there any work on measuring or expressing it? Saying something like "System A has more diffusion than ...
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103 views

What is 'security margin'?

I have been academic papers about Rijndael, Serpent, and Twofish, and there is this term that is vague to me. I cannot find a tangible definition in google. Can someone briefly define, describe, ...
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291 views

AES-CTR vulnerability to cryptographic oracle

I am new to cryptographic issues and from what I googled so far I could not retrieve the information I need. Consider the use of AES-128 in CTR mode. Let M be the set of possible plaintexts, for ...
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141 views

Source for examples with broken cryptography

I've heard again and again that many crypto systems have been broken in the past for one reason or another and that it is best to use one that has been peer reviewed, etc etc. However, I've yet to see ...
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98 views

Using Chi-Square for Vigenere Cipher

I am writing a program which will use Chi-Square to determine which is the correct keyword for a ciphertext via Vigenere Cipher. I came across a website that describes the Chi-Square statistics in a ...
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Questions on rank-attacks in Multivariate Cryptography

While reading this article on rank attacks on STS (a public-key scheme based on Multivariate Quadratic (MQ) equations), I stumbled upon some claims that I've also seen in other presentations on ...
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120 views

Do practical key-less cryptosystems exist?

Hopefully the question isn't too broad or off. Basically, are there any practical, and by practical I mean secure enough that a ciphertext only attack is infeasible, key-less cryptosystems? For ...
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Cryptographic Symmetric Stream Cipher

Let me know a cryptographic symmetric stream cipher system with only two functions say S() and P() and it should satisfy the following conditions: There will be two independent computers say M1 and ...
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How compute encrypt and decrypt runtime for agorithm [closed]

I programming RSA algorithm is the following two function in java language in my thesis ...
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55 views

How compared encryption algorithm in terms of efficiency

I doing to compare two algorithm cryptography. first algorithm is RSA cryptography and second algorithm is El Gamal elliptic curve cryptography. now I want a way to compare between two algorithm by ...
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67 views

How does this Cesar Cipher work?

Suppose I have this cryptogram: http://pastebin.com/QpfRMBg1 Clearly it's a Ceasar Cipher which decrypts to: http://pastebin.com/r50heZuU with a simple shift of 10... OKay, no big deal. Let's take a ...
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329 views

Is a steganographic technique which has a universal decoder novel/secure? [closed]

I've come up with an approach to steganography which needs review of both its cryptography and its math. There's a complete working implementation at https://github.com/bramcohen/DissidentX and the ...
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105 views

How can we determine if two discrete logarithms are equal?

Let $p$ be a prime number, and let $g_{1},g_{2},...,g_{n}$ be $n$ generator of $Z^{*}_{p}$. We have a list $y_{1},y_{2},\dotsc,y_{n}$ of elements in $Z^{*}_{p}$ such that for every $i\in ...
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Break double encryption

Let $E_k$ : {0,1}$^l$ be a block cipher encryption function with block-size $l$ and key-length $n$. In class, we saw that a double encryption with two independent keys $E{}'_{k_1k_2}(x)$ = ...

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