# All Questions

11 views

### Possible CPA or CCA attack when using AES-CBC mode under the following situation?

Both client and server know a shared key in advance. Both sides us EVP_BytesToKey() derive a pair of same key and same IV. Then, client and server start transferring data encrypted by AES-CBC mode ...
19 views

### What's the point of a Meet In The Middle attack using i.e. double AES with throw-away keys?

What's the point of a Meet In The Middle attack while using, for example, a double AES encryption and using one time keys? You can recover the keys for a secret message already known and you can't use ...
49 views

### Partial hash code protocol for security tokens providing signatures

I've read the following two sentences within a beta protocol specification, which references ISO/IEC 7816-8 for PSO:HASH which already contains notions of a "partial hash". The off-card entity is ...
33 views

### Computing Hash of Hashes Unsafe?

I have an arbitrary long list of hashes (e.g. git tree hashes), and I'm wondering by how much I am increasing the risk of hash collisions by condensing them into a single hash, like so: ...
13 views

### How can finding a collision help an attacker with tampering messages with HMAC

As stated in the HMAC RFC (https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2104.txt) : "The strongest attack known against HMAC is based on the frequency of collisions for the hash function H". How can a collision ...
29 views

### Comparing Difference Distribution Tables

I have been studying the Diff. Cryptanalysis and finding it hard to do a problem. The problem is I have calculated the tables programmatically and found that the second table has a max value of 6 ...
30 views

I recently came across an interesting paper detailing the use of hardened session cookies. Each cookie includes a preimage of the password hash, and the preimage is hashed once more and compared to ...
47 views

### Are variable-length crypto hash functions still susceptible to collisions?

I just recently learned that the SHA-3 finalist Keccak allows for variable length output. As the only answer to this question states, "[it] need to have an output length at least equal to the input ...
14k views

332 views

### Is it secure to derive an AES key from a MAC?

I'm working on a project where we need to encrypt a large number of files and store them on the cloud. And I'm wondering if the following process would be secure (we have a “Hardware Security Module” ...
91 views

### What's the consequence of having a short IV? Is one mode better in that case?

I've read lots about null-length IVs being bad for most modes. In a scenario where passing a 128-bit IV along with each message isn't feasible, how would generating the IV from a smaller passed-along ...
235 views

### Seemingly simple decryption question

Forgive the very novice question, but... Given an algorithm which, upon inputting an unchanging 4-character string, generates a variable 6-character string, but having no idea what the algorithm is ...
162 views

### How does compression before encryption leak info about the input?

Apparently current best practices recommend that you do not compress before you encrypt. For example in this blog entry (*): http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2013/07/22/applied-practical-cryptography/ It ...
421 views

### What is Attribute Based Encryption?

Can someone explain what attribute based encryption is? I was searching for a book or something that can help me in this regard but so far I have found none. Google also returns practically nothing ...