# All Questions

257 views

### Can two people with different one time pads securely exchange a message like this?

Alice has a message, generates a one time pad, encrypts her message and sends it to Bob. Bob generates his own one time pad, encrypts the message again, and sends it back to Alice. Alice then decrypts ...
285 views

### Are there any differences in operation between existing Diffie-Hellman specifications?

Are there any differences in operation between existing Diffie-Hellman specifications, especially those within the RSA PKCS#3, ANSI X9.42 and RFC 2631 standards?
94 views

### Are there public $p$ and $q$ numbers for use in DSA?

There are many RFC documents giving large primes to use in Diffie-Hellman. However, I couldn't find standards on the $p$ and $q$ large primes used in the DSA signature scheme. This is proving to be a ...
2k views

### Is it true for Java that the transformation mode and padding is ignored when using RSA?

Consider GregS's comment to this question (more specific to bouncycastle's provider implementation): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11717646/bouncycastle-rsa-key-size-and-padding The mode, ...
241 views

### Why don't we use MACs to store passwords?

These days, the best practice for storing passwords is to use a scheme like scrypt or bcrypt. The goal of these schemes is to make dictionary attack inefficient for an attacker but it also slows down ...
142 views

### How can two (or more) parties share and agree upon a common random seed?

I really don't know how to call this simple problem: Two (or more) parties need to establish a common (non-secret) value to be used as a seed for a deterministic RNG. The only requirement is that each ...
114 views

### Can Diffie-Hellman generate values in a specified range?

Is there any way to generate values only between $0$ and $255$ with the Diffie-Hellman method? I need to create keys for communication algorithms with $32$ and $16$ numbers between that range. The ...
98 views

### Is there a relation between security of rounds of DES and Luby Rackoff rounds?

DES uses 16 rounds of feistel networks but not considered secure . Where Luby Rackoff constructions which are inspired by DES its proven by Patarin that 7 rounds is secure . Is there a relation ...
3k views

### What does AES256-CTS-HMAC-SHA1-96 mean in relation to Kerberos?

I'm not completely clueless as to what it means, but I'd like to understand it at a higher level. The highest encryption type used by Active Directory domain controllers for Kerberos authentication ...
175 views

### Where does the meaning of reduction to a hard problem lie?

Given you a protocol, if we can reduce breaking the protocol to a hard problem, such as DLP or CDH, then we can say that this protocol is secure. Theoretically speaking, reduction is a good method ...
133 views

### Perfect Forward Secrecy in MTI/A0

Would the property of perfect forward secrecy still be achieved in MTI/A0 for a session key that was established between C and D when one LL-key aD is revealed so that both LL-keys aC and aD are ...
176 views

### Can someone tell if my Hand Cipher is secure? [closed]

In easy steps, this is how it works: Convert txt to numbers. mod 1-26. Generate random numbers (by my other cipher) equal to plain txt. Write random numbers under txt numbers. Like this: ...
373 views

### How can an encryption scheme be indistinguishable with multiple messages but vulnerable to an adaptive chosen-plaintext attack?

In order to be indistinguishable with respect to multiple messages, wouldn't the scheme need to be nondeterministic? How would this then possibly be vulnerable to an adaptive CPA?
503 views

### Why $n=pq$ with $p=2p'+1$ and $q=2q'+1$ instead of just $n=p'q'$ for RSA crypto?

For RSA cryptography, we know that the modulo $n$ is a product of two big prime numbers(say $p$ and $q$). However, in some documents I see an extension of $p=2p'+1$ and $q=2q'+1$ with $q'$ and $p'$ ...
381 views

### In elliptic curve cryptography, how is “A dot A” computed?

I was just reading Ars Technica's primer on ECC. Somewhere near the middle of the second page, the author introduces the "dot" operation that takes an elliptic curve and two other known points, giving ...
187 views

### Are there any protocols that are truly secure from active and passive MITM attacks?

Are there are any cryptographic protocols or algorithms that can prevent active MITM attacks or interference when initiating a new connection to a server or someone you have not exchange keys with ...
130 views

### Why is $-1$ an illegal message in the Goldwasser-Micali Encryption Scheme

I'm not sure why in the Goldwasser-Micali encryption scheme with a Blum integer $N$, the message $-1$ is always a illegal message. Can you give me some direction for starting? What is illegal ...
77 views

### How to pass an arbitrary signature to a certificate

I am trying to sign certificate (X509) using secret sharing. That is shareholders combine their signatures to produce the final signature which will be in this case the signed certificate. However ...
360 views

### Why is it important to generate a pseudorandom permutation from a pseudorandom function?

Most of the papers on block cipher constructions, especially the ones which discuss constructing block ciphers of arbitrary lengths or small domains, the techniques are designed based on building a ...
255 views

### How do I sign data that's been encrypted using public key? (RSA)

I've received a public key to encrypt my data for the other end to decrypt using their private key. Now, they want us to sign the data as well to ensure non-repudiation. I thought that I should only ...
401 views

### Is encrypting credit card numbers one by one with rsautl secure?

I wish to encrypt credit card numbers one by one using asymmetric encryption on the command line. My current approach is this… Encrypt: ...
84 views

### partial-domain permutation and strong assumption

Quoting "Verified Security of Redundancy-Free Encryption from Rabin and RSA", Chapter 2 (on page 4): OAEP was proved IND-CCA-secure by Fujisaki et al. [28] under the assumption that the underlying ...
830 views

### Elliptic curve cryptography related key attacks

This question is an extension of Families of public/private keys in elliptic curve cryptography As described above, bitcoin "type 2" deterministic wallets use a root private/public key pair, where ...
237 views

### Security of RSA-substitution-RSA

Following on from here, I am unconvinced that encrypting twice with RSA is a waste of time: doesn't it depend on what is placed in-between the two encryptions?. What would happen if a permutation was ...
94 views

### Sematically Secure McEliece

I am read the Lemma 2 (pp13) in the paper "Kazukuni Kobara and Hideki Imai: Semantically Secure McEliece Public-Key Cryptosystems –Conversions for McEliece PKC– (PKC 2001)". Related to the question ...
867 views

### Hash functions throughput performance [closed]

Without taking into account security, which hash function is the fastest one among the following: MD5, SHA-1, SHA-2 (for various internal size), Keccak, and other… ?
181 views

### Generator for Group $QR_{N}$

Let $N=PQ$, where $P=2p+1$ and $Q=2q+1$. $P,Q,p,q$ are prime numbers. $QR_{N}$ is the set of quadratic residues modulo $N$. Please help me to prove $QR_{N}$ is a cyclic group. Note: $QR_{P}$ and ...
10k views

### How long does it take to crack DES and AES?

Suppose that a single evaluation of a block-cipher (DES or AES) takes 10 operations, and the computer can do $10^{15}$ such operations per second. How long would it take for to recover a DES key, ...
282 views

### Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Integers - Runtime Question

I have a question regarding the paper "Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Integers" (http://eprint.iacr.org/2009/616.pdf): On page 6 after they set their parameters, it says "This setting results ...
155 views

### About Elliptic Curve ElGamal, 3 simple problems I have trouble with

In Elliptic Curve ElGamal, why are a=b=1 always legal for primes whose lengths are no shorter than 11(2) bits long? Is there any reason why the Point at Infinity can always be encoded as (0,0)? ...
184 views

### What aspects of information theory are used in modern cryptography? [closed]

In studying modern (and classical) cryptography, many notions from information theory crop up. Unicity distance, min-entropy, compression, encoding, etc. What parts of information theory should be ...
894 views

### Signature algorithm SHA 1-2 with ECDSA

Can someone please explain what key sizes are required for the ECDSA algorithm? I tried a 128 bit EC Key for SHA1withECDSA and it throws an error. However with 256 bit key I could run the algorithm. ...
424 views

### AES-CTR mode and the Biclique Attack

The biclique attacks that break AES (Biclique Cryptanalysis of the full AES) appear to require decryption oracles to work, presumably because the key schedule of AES is weaker in the decryption ...
167 views

### Would this program be useful in cryptography?

I know nothing of encrypting. I'm not even sure how to tag this. I wrote a program that can calculate this pretty quickly on my macbook pro 2.3GHz IntelCore i7. The two exponents are Mersenne primes, ...
296 views

### Is it true, that non-military cryptography appeared in 50's and 60's only thanks to leaks from the NSA? [closed]

I'm not talking about scytale, but encryption like RSA, DES, etc... How did exactly civil cryptography evolve after WWII?
260 views

### Is multiplicative secret sharing secure?

I suggested mulitiplicative secret sharing in an answer to another question, but noted that I wasn't sure if it was even secure and was hoping someone would comment on the security. Since no one did, ...
2k views

### What does it mean if second half of 8-char string encrypted in 3DES is always identical?

In the recent Adobe passwords leak, presumably encrypted in 3DES ECB, second half of all 8-character passwords is identical: ioxG6CatHBw== Source: http://pastebin.com/iDTFARwq (guesses based on ...
211 views

### Transparent cipher

I'm trying to implement this protocol: Alice has her permanent key $K_1$. She computes $E(K_1, P)$. She wants to share $P$ with Bob, Carol and Dave. For each of them she: 2.1. Generates $K_2$. ...
246 views

### Can we decrypt in this order when the message is encrypted twice?

If we encrypt a message twice with symmetric key $k_1$ first and then $k_2$ like $E_{k2}\{E_{k1}\{m\}\}$ , ideally we should decrypt with $k_2$ first and then $k_1$ but is it possible to decrypt with ...
983 views

### What are monotonic and non monotonic access structures in ABE ?

While reading Attribute Based Encryption Schemes, I did not quite understand what a monotonic access structure or non monotonic access structures are. Is there a popular explanation of those terms ? ...
370 views

### Appropriate AES key length for short term protection

Currently I'm doing some initial research for a fully connected distributed network communication model. The context here is a peer-to-peer multiplayer protocol, using a majority-voting system. More ...
92 views

### Threshold cryptosystem with a required share

I am trying to find an implementation or variant of a (k, n) threshold cryptosystem (as described here Shamir's Secret Sharing) where we can fix at least one of the k key parts, i.e., instead of ANY k ...
26k views

### Explaining weakness of Dual EC DRBG to wider audience?

I have an audience of senior (non-technical) executives and senior technical people who are taking the backdoor in Dual_EC_DRBG and considering it as a weakness of Elliptic curves in general. I can ...
574 views

### random access stream cipher

Some time ago I was working in a pet project for a type of database engine. And I thought about securing the data in disk with encryption.. and since the main code was already developed.. I had a few ...
962 views

### What is so special about elliptic curves?

There seems to be sources like this, this also, and some introductions that discuss elliptic curves in general and how they're used. But what I'd like to know is why these particular curves are so ...
128 views

### How to design a secure data container?

I want to design a secure data container that can be used to transfer encrypted data over a public network that can defeat common attacks. Data is already encrypted before entering this container so ...
152 views

### Encrypted query parameters via HMAC

I have an unsubscribe link, which needs to be passed a customer id, and a product id, producing a query string something like: ?cid=100&pid=2 I would like to ...
929 views

### How are IVs used in association with RSA Encryption?

How are IVs used in association with RSA Encryption? Can someone explain why we use them in this RSA context?
So for a Diffie-Hellman problem, I am given the prime $p$ for the Diffie-Hellman exchange. I am also given $g$, secret number for machine as $A$, secret number for station as $B$, a Diffie-Hellman ...