# All Questions

214 views

### Why use $(r,s)$ instead of $(r,s^{-1})$ as DSA signature?

A DSA signature consists of two scalars $(r,s)$. When signing $s$ is generated as: $s=k^{-1}(H(m)+xr) \mod q$ The signature is $(r,s)$ When verifying $s$ is only used to compute $w = s^{-1}$. So ...
350 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 ...
1k 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.
122 views

### How can I split a message in parts of similar size or smaller?

I have a 130-160 characters message that I need to split in say, 3 parts, and be able to reconstruct it by recovering all 3 parts. I also need that these parts are type-able, meaning that they can't ...
280 views

### IV Security Clarification

After doing lots of reading on SO and other websites relating to AES cryptography, I am trying to understand the security issues surrounding IV's. There seems to be a lot of confusion and ...
443 views

### When making public key fingerprints - is a sha1 hash still a good idea?

I'm thinking about trying to save some space (and readability) when referencing 2k and 4k public keys (millions of them) by storing the fingerprint in some places instead of the full public key. ...
848 views

### If RSA is limited to 117-200 bytes or so, is that a very limited use case?

Am I missing something, or is RSA very very limiting when it comes to ecrypting data when it comes to the actual message size? I have read that you can only encrypt a message of around 117 to 200 ...
587 views

### Are block ciphers used in public key crypto?

I was reading about block ciphers and most articles state they are being used in symmetric key cryptography. Are they also being used in public key cryptography? if not, what alternative pkc use? ...
45 views

### Distributing blocks with validation and non-dependant list generation

Problem Suppose I have a system of nodes that can communicate with a parent node, but not among each other. Suppose then a file on the parent node is split up into blocks and divided among the ...
554 views

### How is text converted to a number for RSA? [duplicate]

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_%28algorithm%29#Key_generation the key length is the number of bits in n. So how can a message of many megabytes (millions of bits) be modded by a 1024 ...
371 views

I read that the Encrypt-then-MAC paradigm is provably secure. From what I understand, when using for example AES for encryption and HMAC_SHA256 for MAC generation (and the keys $K_1 \neq K_2$), this ...
260 views

### HMAC and assumptions on the cryptographic hash

According to Wikipedia, a cryptographic hash function has the following properties: Pre-image resistance: Given $h$, it's difficult to find any message $m$ such that $h = H(m)$. Second pre-image ...
267 views

### ECC Point Multiplication of Product

I can calculate $Q = a\,b\,G$ in several ways: $Q = a \, (b \, G)$ or $Q = b \, (a \, G)$. These give the same result, as expected. But if I do $c = (a \, b) \bmod n$ where $a \, b$ is much greater ...
2k views

### Why crypto hash functions must be collision resistant and how to find resistant?

Why cryptographic hash functions must be collision-free and is there any methods to evaluate whether a function is not resistant to collision? Thanks,
247 views

### Is entropy affected by time?

I'm quite new to cryptographic systems, and today we discussed entropy at work. Since entropy is used to ensure the difficulty for an attacker to break in, I was wondering if the more time the high ...
69 views

### Why does the server in S/KEY authentication only store a single password?

I've been reading about the S/KEY One-Time Password system on wikipedia here and was wondering why the server only stores a single password and not the list of one-time passwords like the client does. ...
480 views

### With HMAC, can an attacker recover the key, given many known plaintext/tag pairs?

Given many pairs of $(m, t)$, can the attacker compute the key $k$ satisfying $\text{HMAC}(k,m) = t$? (Assume that $k$ was chosen at random.)
107 views

### A substitution based on a matrix vector product

I choose at random an invertible square matrix A of size 128 in GF(2). I want to use this matrix as a substitution box. Is this a non linear transformation ? I've seen that substitution boxes are ...
307 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 ...
199 views

### Can somebody explain the major contributions of the tenants of the Gödel Prize 2013?

As you may know, the Gödel Prize 2013 will be awarded this year to cryptographers (see this ACM press release). The people awarded are Antoine Joux, the team of Dan Boneh and Matthew K. Franklin. Can ...
306 views

### Can i modify data “protected” by a CRC16?

There are 100 bytes with a CRC16. However I only know the first 50. I want to change byte 5 from a known value X to another value Y, and fix up the CRC16 to be valid - without knowing bytes 50-100. ...
162 views

### Which keys are necessary to decrypt Application data in a SSL connection?

I'm debugging an application which communicates between client and server using a SSL/TLS connection, and want to capture and analyze the sent data. Are the client write keys and server write keys ...
153 views

### The security of the AES secret itself

I am writing an application, running on a server, where multiple users access data from a database which is AES encrypted with a master secret. The master secret itself is initially randomly ...
281 views

### Pen-and-paper one-way function for externally-anonymous survey

When conducting surveys, an Administrator might send an Enumerator to survey a Respondent. For "sensitive" questions (e.g. about embarrassing behavior), the Respondent may be fine with the truth being ...
139 views

### Complex Numbers on Elliptic Curves & Usage in Tate Pairing

I'm working with understanding the internals of the Tate Pairing. I was going through an example of the curve $E: y^2 = x^3 + 3x$ over $\mathbb{F_{11}}$. The author is showing the computation of ...
695 views

### Reversing SHA1 (don't know the correct term)

Given sha1(pad(A) || pad(B)), where B is known, can I calculate sha1(pad(A))? pad(A) means its length is exactly 1 block (64 bytes for SHA-1) If yes, for which other hash functions it will work too? ...
1k views

### How robust is discrete logarithm in $GF(2^n)$?

"Normal" discrete logarithm based cryptosystems (DSA, Diffie-Hellman, ElGamal) work in the finite field of integers modulo a big prime p. However, there exist other finite fields out there, in ...
997 views

### How to test if a number is a primitive root?

How to test if a number is a primitive root, assuming the modulus is a prime? And if not? Is it not enough if the number is relatively prime to the modulus or prime?
697 views

### Could quantum computers “break” symmetric crypto-systems (e.g. AES)?

These days I'm reading about quantum computing and quantum cryptography which I've found extremely interesting. Well, I also read some blog posts of Bruce Schneier talking about how quantum computers ...
112 views

### RSA vs El Gamal digital signature. Which is more secure? [duplicate]

I'm reading about the notions of security concerning digital signatures and I can't understand whether RSA is more secure than El Gamal digital signature. Well, they are both prone to forgery, but I ...
113 views

### How well analyzed are giant block length ciphers?

I have heard about ciphers that have a block length of 256 megabytes... That is huge. How well are they understood by the encryption community? I'm referring to PMC Ciphers. Has anyone used such a ...
108 views

### Encrypt user email but be able to find user by email

Sorry for my dumb question, but it's better to ask dumb question than to do dumb things silently. I want to encrypt user email in my DB so that if someone stole the DB (and not the key) - he won't be ...
1k views

### Why is SRP not widely used?

SRP seems to be a very good password authentication protocol, compared to any other things used now. So why is there no popular implementations, or even no working secure implementations? I tried to ...
1k views

### AES encryption with multiple keys

I would like to encrypt some data using a combination of multiple keys. There would be two keys: a client keys that would be generated for each client and a single server/application key used by ...
235 views

### Why is verification using DSA slower than verification with RSA?

We read in literature that verification of a digital signature is slower using DSA than if we used RSA. Why is this? DSA parameter generation: choose prime number $p$ choose prime number $q$ such ...
1k views

### University for Crypto grad study [closed]

(I thought twice before asking this question and quite reluctant to type as well, but I think this would be helpful). I am an undergrad student and choose theoretical computer science as my major. ...
47 views

### Conditions for proving that a signcryption scheme is secure

If I'm able to prove that any scheme satisfies confidentiality ad unforgeability conditions, will it be a valid signcryption scheme, without explicit signature and encryption parts ?
127 views

### what actually the function for e(g,g)^xy

I doing a project using ABE "Attribute-Based-Encryption" but i didn't understand what actually the function for $e(g,g)^xy$. Just tell what's the calculation need to perform here. I gone through no of ...
153 views

### Size of Parameters in Polynomial Key-Splitting Algorithm

I've seen the elegant way of splitting a key among different people so that only a certain number need to be present to re-compute the key, yet nobody has enough information to re-compute the key on ...
556 views

### Why RSA uses {d,n} as private key instead of {e,n}?

While studying the RSA algorithm I referred to some books and some sites such as RSA (wikipedia) and all of them chose {d,n} as the secret (private) key and release {e,n} as the public key but as d ...
339 views

### Key sizes for discrete logarithm based methods

I have a question regarding the key generation process of methods that are based on the discrete logarithm problem. This site gives some good insights, but I don't fully grasp it I think: ...
165 views

### Isn't the structure of a potential plaintext of a ciphertext generated by a one-time pad dispositive, cryptanalysis-wise?

That is, if I generate every possible result, and analyze the structure against, for example, a dictionary, won't that identify which of the solutions in the domain is most likely the correct one? I ...
317 views

### Requiring a “supervisor” key pair and a “user” key pair to decrypt multiple-recipient messages

I've been toying with some encryption scenarios recently. One of the hard ones I came across is a multi-party system. So we have Bob -- The person who sends the message (and knows it's recipients) ...
569 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 ...
282 views

### Perfect Secrecy, two Definitions

I'm reading the proof of the implication "Def 2.1 $\Rightarrow$ Def 2.4" in these slides about Adversarial Indistinguishability and Perfectly-Secret Encryption. I have a doubt in the slide 10. Here it ...
140 views

### Do I need to keep a 64-bit version number secret?

Assume the following structure: version | iv | ciphertext | HMAC(version | iv | ciphertext | ..., key) The version starts out ...
473 views

### How much data can I encrypt with AES before I need to change the key in CBC mode?

In my cryptography class, the instructor suggested that in order to give the attacker a minimal advantage of $1/2^{32}$, we have to change the key after $2^{48}$ blocks are encrypted. It seems that ...
539 views

### What are the potential security impacts of using CRAM-MD5 for Emails, when not using an SSL connection?

Background: My current server-provider tells me it's no problem to store the passwords in plain-text in the database, saying he has to do so because they use CRAM-MD5 for email authentication. But ...