# All Questions

365 views

### Why Victor must not know which tunnel Peggy chooses?

In the classic description of Zero Knowledge Proof of Knowledge, Victor must wait outside the entrance to the cave while Peggy goes to the fork and choose a side. It's only once Peggy has entered a ...
671 views

### Authenticated DH, what protocols are secure?

I read about STS + variants being insecure in the SIGMA paper, which then proposes SIGMA as a replacement. Are the SIGMA variants still considered secure or are there some other protocol that's ...
894 views

### Can I determine if a user has the wrong symmetric encryption key?

We're using the Objectivity/DB object database with a custom encryption plugin that encrypts serialized objects on disk. Encryption uses AES with a shared secret key held by all users. I would like to ...
693 views

### Is key size the only barrier to the adoption of the McEliece cryptosystem, or is it considered broken/potentially vulnerable?

A recent paper showed that the McEliece cryptosystem is not, unlike RSA and other cryptosystems, weakened as drastically by quantum computing because strong Fourier sampling cannot solve the hidden ...
6k views

### With OpenSSL and ECDHE, how to show the actual curve being used?

Using openssl s_client -host myserver.net -port 443 I can see the cipher negotiated is indeed using ECDHE for session key ...
372 views

### Alice trusts Bob only when Bob trusts Alice

some story first: Alice and Bob both have public/private key pairs. Now Bob wants Alice to sign his public key id. Alice agrees but only when Bob signs the public key id of her. Is this something ...
3k views

### Should I salt an AES password at each encryption?

I saw a sample code where the same password is salted with a different value (using PBKDF2) for each encryption. That means that the salt must be stored for each encrypted message. I don't understand ...
4k views

### Encryption with “constant” initialization vector considered harmful

I try to get the full reasoning behind the above statement. First, after reading articles here and at wikipedia i understand that using an IV only once is good practice. For stream ciphers not doing ...
727 views

### Why does a broken hash function undermine an HMAC?

For instance, what makes MD4 a bad choice for an HMAC? In this case I am asking about MD4 because its less than ideal. I know that a preimage attack can be used to undermine the system, but why? ...
2k views

### Use of salt to hash a password

In a few implementations of hashed passwords, I have seen that the length of the random salt is chosen to be, say, 10 or "some constant". Is there any specific reason why the salt is chosen to have a ...
2k views

### Change Salt when Changing Password?

Assume a password storage scheme using a computationally-expensive hash algorithm and a CSPRNG salt. User ID, salt, and hash value are stored in a table; if the table is compromised, all three ...
532 views

### Is SHA-1 still practically secure under specific scenarios?

It is conjectured that SHA-1 has been broken from the "research" perspective but no in real world. That is that there is an algebraic attack that explores weaknesses on its algebraic construction. The ...
1k views

### Does a trace of SSL packets provide a proof of data authenticity?

I'm wondering if it would make sense to record a whole HTTPS session, publish its encryption keys and present it to third parties as a proof that this particular data was sent by a given server ...
7k views

### Rijndael vs. Serpent vs. Twofish: General comparison

Can anyone explain (or give a link to document about) why Rijndaal won the AES, especially comparing it to other finalists (Serpent and Twofish)? What criteria were used to make decision? Or is there ...
732 views

### Rainbow table for DES with all-zero plaintext?

Consider the function $F$ from $\{0,1\}^{56}$ to $\{0,1\}^{64}$, mapping the operative bits of a DES key to the ciphertext for all-zero plaintext. How could we organize a rainbow table to invert that ...
1k views

### Description of signatures with message recovery (as in ISO/IEC 9796-2 and EMV Signatures)

I'd like to get an overview of how the signatures with message recovery work, especially in case EMV and other smart card systems. Is there a nice overview available without being required to read the ...
277 views

### Secure degree reduction for Shamir's secret sharing

I understand the basic Shamir Secret Sharing protocol, and when two shares are multiplied, the degree of the polynomial increases. I've seen in a number of papers a reference to a degree reduction ...
1k views

### How do I test my encryption? (absolute amateur)

I am a hobby programmer with a background in biology and have developed an encryption program based on DNA. I tried to make it hard to crack, but it's essentially a substitution cipher and uses the ...
914 views

### How does a “Tiger Tree Hash” handle data whose size isn't a power of two?

Constructing a hash tree is simple enough if the data fits into a number of blocks that is a power of two. ...
602 views

### Does MD5 generate 128 independent bits?

I heard that there are 128 stochastically independent bits in an MD5 output. Is that true? If so, are there any citations or proofs for that?
108 views

### Are there any long term RC4 bias based exploits?

The RC4 cipher possibly exhibits low level bias in it's long run PRNG keystream. I'm specifically excluding short term bias attacks which I'm defining as outputs < 1024 bytes. Are there any real ...
663 views

### Can we proxy-re-encrypt using homomorphic encryption schemes?

Homomorphic encryption schemes are PKE schemes with an additional special method Evaluate. The Evaluate method takes input any function (as boolean circuit) and encrypted inputs of the function and ...
646 views

### Given a private RSA key, how do we get the public key?

Is it possible to pre-choose a private RSA key, then obtain a public key from it?
1k views

### What are the constraints for an IV using AES in CBC mode?

I'm designing a protocol for use into a VPN software. The VPN frames are encapsulated into AES-256 CBC encrypted frames. I understand that IVs must be uniquely used for each message encrypted with ...
4k views

### How many keys does the Playfair Cipher have?

I was just studying the Playfair cipher and from what I've understood, it is just a slightly better version of a Caesar cipher, in that it isn't actually mono-alphabetic but rather the 'digrams' are ...
912 views

### Encryption algorithm that produces dummy output on incorrect passwords

Background: I've been thinking about using encryption in the context of backing up files to untrusted locations (to the point of making the file publicly and widely distributed for practically ...
713 views

### Are RSA signatures deterministic?

If I sign the word HELLO with the mechanism "NONEwithRSA" with the same private key, do I always will have the same signature? A Java example always return ...
654 views

### Is ECB mode secure if plaintexts guaranteed to be unique?

I've got a scenario where I need to encrypt many small (16-byte) plaintexts. I want to use AES-128 in ECB mode. Notably, each plaintext is guaranteed to be unique, though each may differ by only a few ...
376 views

### Feedback on rolling my own entropy gatherer

First of all, I don't recommend doing this. This was something I created when I didn't know better and didn't have a solution available to me. Long ago I created my own entropy gather for a ...
129 views

Let $G$ be a cyclic multiplicative group of order $n$. Let $g$ be a (public) generator of $G$. The Diffie-Hellman (DH) problem asks: Given $g^x, g^y\in G$ for $x, y\in \mathbb{Z}^*_n$, to compute ...
2k views

### What happens when a root CA has its private key compromised?

What happens when a root CA has its private key compromised? Then all children in the tree are compromised too? And then all certificates are compromised? What needs to happen then? Related: - How ...
1k views

### RSA key pair generation using PRNG with same seed

I see a lot of Q/A where persons are trying to generate a specific key pair using static data such as a password. Now say we use a known PRNG (dangerous assumption), seeded with a the data as a static ...
774 views

### Why are these specific values used to initialise the hash buffer in SHA-512?

I'm reading the book Network Security Essentials written by William Stallings. To create a message digest with SHA-512, we have to go through some steps: append padding bits. append length ...
850 views

### How do I generate a session key using the Diffie Hellman algorithm?

How to generate a session key between two nodes in two different subnets when the nodes don't know each other directly, using diffie hellman algorithm?
751 views

### Proving the semantic security of the One Time pad

Currently hearing a lecture on cryptography, and the professor gave us the definition of semantic security, which is roughly the following (formally not quite complete, but you get the idea): ...
185 views

### Is there an oblivious decryption scheme?

Alice has $K$; Bob has $E(K, m)$; Is there such a scheme that enables Alice decrypts $E(K, m)$ without knowing $m$, and Bob gets $m$ ?
5k views

### What is the meaning of “trapdoor” in cryptography?

I do not really understand the meaning of a "trapdoor" in cryptography, so here are my questions: What is the meaning of trapdoor and how can I convert a word or string using a trapdoor in ...
2k views

### Symmetric vs. Asymmetric cryptographic approaches to data security

I know the basic differences between Symmetric vs. Asymmetric cryptography, but I'd love to know more details: Exactly why is the asymmetric approach slower than the symmetric? Why does it make ...
1k views

### Is RSA of a random nonce with no padding safe?

Consider the following protocol: Bob has a private RSA key $B_{priv}$, and Alice knows the public key $B_{pub}$. Alice wants to send confidential messages to Bob (no integrity intended). To send a ...
219 views

### Choosing finite field size in Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme

The Wikipedia article on Shamir's Secret Sharing says to that to have information theoretical security the splitting algorithm should be evaluated using finite field arithmetic on the field ...
485 views

### Why does the DES crypto algorithm NOT use 2 rounds?

Now, if we were to go round by round, you could give a distinct reason for not using a single round since after just one round, the right half of the text comes directly, as-is, to form the left half ...
169 views

### Finding out the greater number under zero-knowledge conditions?

Is it possible to construct a zero knowledge proof that one encrypted number is larger (or not) than another encrypted number without releasing the values of either numbers?
1k views

### Open source implementations of Symmetric Searchable Encryption and Order Preserving Encryption [closed]

Are there open source implementations of SSE and OPE? Can anyone please point to sample codes, if available. EDIT If cryptDB is not an option, what other options are available? (Indeed, these ...
1k views

### How secure would HMAC-SHA3 be?

It would be possible to implement the HMAC construction with (draft) SHA-3, leading to HMAC-SHA3-224, HMAC-SHA3-256, HMAC-SHA3-384, HMAC-SHA3-512 (the last 3 digits are the output size $\ell$, where ...
1k views

### Is Encrypt+HMAC stronger than AEAD?

There are a few posts that I've come across that seem to infer that using regular encryption and a MAC might be better than using the newer AEAD (ie: AES/GCM) modes. ...
1k views

### AES - What is the advantage of a 256-bit key with a 128-bit block cipher? [duplicate]

I'm just trying to wrap my mind around the decision to select the 128-bit Rijndael as the AES cipher, even with 192-bit and 256-bit keys. Even with a 256-bit key, you only get 2^128 possible outputs ...
1k views

### Are AES-256's related-key weaknesses exploitable if it is used to build a hash?

Assume it is made a hash based on AES-256 encryption (perhaps because this is hardware-accelerated, but no standard hash is); and it is used the Merkle–Damgård structure, that is padding of the ...
1k views

### About Cryptography in a Character Language

Suppose I had a message in Chinese (or another non-phonetic language) and I wanted to encipher it. Some of the simplest encryptions in English are substitution ciphers, but such ciphers don't seem ...