# All Questions

182 views

### Security of (cryptographic) padding compared to other methods for blockcompletion for block ciphers

As said in the heading, I want to know how the security of different padding methods, e.g. ANSI X.923, ISO 10126 and PKCS7, is compared to other methods to reach the needed block size, like ciphertext ...
740 views

### Why are the first few bytes of a gpg encryption always the same?

If I run the command 'gpg -a -e < input.txt > output.txt' with completely different inputs (e.g. from /dev/urandom), the first 19 characters are always the same. What is this header? Is it ...
219 views

### Relationship between Elliptic Curve Discrete Log, Integer Discrete Log, and Integer Factorization

I am trying to look into a relation between the following three problems which are widely used to build public crypto systems: Integer Discrete log Elliptic Curve Discrete log Integer Factorization ...
204 views

### What are the security effects of reusing a public RSA key to encrypt large data by blocks? [duplicate]

I'm trying to figure out a way to do public key encryption on a very large piece of data. For this, I of course want one side to do the encrypting but is unable to decrypt the data, and the other ...
868 views

### How to supply the GCM authentication tag to the OpenSSL command line tools?

I'm using AES-256-GCM for authenticated encryption. In order to decrypt, the ruby OpenSSL library requires an auth_tag parameter (in addition to the key and iv). ...
132 views

### Does it necessarily mean that an RSA moduli generated with poor randomness is not random?

In 2012 a group of researchers collected a large amount of RSA moduli and calculated their greatest common divisor in order to find common factors between them. By finding a common factor they could ...
1k views

### Reduction of Integer factorization to Discrete logarithm problem

I was reading Eric Bach paper entitles "Discrete logarithms and factoring", in which he states the following reductions: solving the integer factorization problem suffices to solve the discrete ...
387 views

### How can Alice prove that a message has not been tampered with?

In terms of the usual suspects. The problem I have is that Alice wants to send Bob a message M, which gives Bob permission to perform some actions. However Alice wants to verify, from time to ...
324 views

### What operations are used in symmetric cryptography and why?

In continuation to Why are bitwise rotations used in cryptography?: what other operations are commonly used in symmetric cryptography? Are there particular operations on numbers that are good for ...
293 views

### modular exponentiation as a one-way-hash

As far as I can tell most one-way hashes apply some iterated encryption algorithm to the input data. What would be the issues with a one-way hash based on some fixed large prime p and a generator g ...
128 views

### How to build a secure AE scheme with generic composition?

I am actually looking for using a secure Encrypt-Then-MAC AE scheme , and consider using either an existing "ready-to-use" dedicated AEAD mode (GCM, OCB, CCM, EAX, etc ..) or an alternate composed ...
3k views

### How long to bruteforce a RSA key [duplicate]

Suppose I have a 2048 bit RSA public key, and want to brute force the corresponding private key. I guess there are 2048^16 possible combinations? How long would this take me to brute force with an ...
106 views

### Prepend information about encryption implementation to the stored data

I want to preface this by saying i will not be using any of this code/information in a live project, this is only for learning/fun (so I welcome some speculation) I was looking at how the PHP crypt() ...
716 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 ...
311 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 ...
167 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 ...
367 views

### Are there any hand ciphers not obsoleted by computer cryptanalysis? [duplicate]

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 ...
158 views

### Is this a sensible cryptographic protocol intending to reduce the impact of compromised security?

I'm in the process of designing a cryptographic protocol which will reduce the impact an attacker will have if they gained root access to a server storing data. The basic crux of it is that keys ...
375 views

### Designing a security system from scratch with a custom protocol, suggestions needed

For the reasons I cannot go into details, I need to design my own protocol and overall security system which will be used to establish secure data exchange between various devices (most notably ...
373 views

### What does $(\mathbb{Z}_n^*)^2$ mean?

In a paper they write once, $(\mathbb{Z}_n^*)^2$. Is this the group of quadratic residues or is it something else? Here the theorem: Under the strong RSA assumption, given a modulus $n$, along with ...
367 views

### Using the output of a stream cipher, how to guarantee the integrity of 4 bytes of data?

I am designing a simple and secure stream communication protocol. My idea was to build each message sent to the wire as: (message size || clear text || UHASH(message size || clear text)) $\oplus$ ...
115 views

### How to learn the first bit of m in padded RSA

Consider the following version of padded RSA encryption, where encryption of $m$ is done by setting $m′ = (0^k~||~r~||~00000000~||~m)$ for a random $r$ (of length 8 btyes = 64 bits) and then computing ...
262 views

### How secure is passing a MAC to Python's random.seed before using random.choice to generate a MAC?

I'd like to use Python's random.choice seeded with a HMAC-SHA1 tag to generate a MAC encoded in a variable set of chars. ...
506 views

### Does key authentication in SSH protect from MitM?

How do cryptography in SSH(2) work (secure channel establishment, authentication)? Does key authentication in SSH(2) protect from MitM by providing authentication and integrity and why?
682 views

### Proper uses for CTR and CBC AES block cipher modes

Assuming the following: Key is randomly generated is being used (32 bytes+) IV is also randomly generated Crypto random key generator is used Data being encrypted contains common bytes like ...
257 views

### ECKS-PS algorithm: searching in encrypted data; bilinear maps

I have found an encryption algorithm named ECKS-PS (published in the paper Efficient conjunctive keyword search on encrypted data storage system) that allows an user to search in encrypted data. All ...
91 views

### PBKDF2 when dkLen and hLen have the same size

I was reading RFC 2898 and something is not clear to me. When I use PBKDF2 with SHA-256 and I want a derived key with length 32 bytes (the same length as my hash function output), your derived key ...
442 views

### How to make a message into a polynomial on NTRU encryption?

How to make a message into a polynomial on NTRU encryption? for example how we can conver 'hello world' to polynomial... i have read the converting operation on IEEE Std 1363.1- 2008, but i can't ...
207 views

### Sensible usecase for restricting special characters in passwords? [closed]

Please See Why Not Allow Special Characters In a Password on Security. Several websites I've come across limit the allowed special characters for a password. My thought was, it should all be ...
209 views

### Exponentiation In PBC library

I need to compute a function $h^l$, where h is an element of G2 and l is a rational number. How can this be done using the PBC library? I have converted the h to ...
5k views

### Simple example for CP-ABE (Ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption)

I'm currently working on Ciphertext Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE). So far I'm only using it with a basic understanding how it actually works. Now I want to understand it a bit better, but ...
196 views

### Why is Blum-Goldwasser not IND-CCA-2 secure?

Consider the Blum-Goldwasser encryption scheme as described on Wikipedia. I was told that it was not IND-CCA-2 secure. I heard there was malleabilty, probably it has to do with XOR-ing. But I do not ...
82 views

### Could use an explanation of the notation for an oracle adversary

In the definition below, what exactly does it mean for the adversary (not even sure that's the correct term?) to equal one? $$\underset{K}{Pr} \left [A^{F_k(\cdot)} = 1 \right ]$$ Source (Page ...
1k views

### AES key/ciphertext space sizes

This is giving me a brain ache now... If I have AES-128, block is 128 bit, then every plaintext (128-bit) can be encrypted to some ciphertext that is also 128-bit. This is the block size. But: 128-bit ...
171 views

### What are unified addition and differential addition in elliptic curve point arithmetic?

A lot of papers use these terms but I do not find a proper explanation of them. Can somebody tell the meaning / difference / intuition / application and if possible with an example.
114 views

### Tell me about non-MD5/SHA1 key fingerprints

I understand there are specifications for public-key fingerprints that use modern hash algorithms like SHA2. What are they?
175 views

### Is such a crypto-system available?

$E(k_1, pt) = c_1, E(k_2, c_1) = c_2, D(k_{new}, c_2) = pt$, where $k_{new} = f(k_1, k_2).$ Sharing $k_{new}$ and $k_2$ should reveal no information about $k_1$. Clarifications: Being able to ...
170 views

### Entropy in natural language texts

I have a couple of related questions: I read about an estimate, ascribed to Turing, of the entropy of English text to be between 0.6 and 1.3 bits per letter. The modern day corpus, including the huge ...
130 views

### Trapdoor implementation

Please refer to this secure index paper. On page#6, a trapdoor is defined as ...
330 views

### Store hashed email and compare hash values

I have a number of different systems sending me email addresses, but I don't actually need the underlying email, just a hash of the email address. I know I can compare hash values to find matches ...
1k 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 ? ...
177 views

### What would the Internet be like without public-key cryptography?

The functioning of the Internet as we know it nowadays depends very heavily on public-key cryptography, including several key root systems that depend on its asymmetric properties. But what would it ...
92 views

### tower of extension field

while working on tate pairing, i have to implement towering technique. like i have point p on F(q) and point Q(F(q^k)) (here embedding degree k=12 for BN curve). instead of taking a point Q on ...
509 views

### AES Secure key generation and storage

I have a client-server application, which is transferring data between its components in a secure way. I currently use AES algorithm with CBC mode to transfer data and file. This is the scenario: ...
168 views

### Bent Combining Functions

Bent functions are boolean functions with maximum nonlinearity and are widely studied for their potential applications in cryptography. Lets say you wanted to use a simple two input AND gate as a ...
145 views

### Ensuring integrity of a client side script

I want a script that is running on the client to compute a collision resistant hash and send it to a server. I need to ensure that the script which performs this hash is not altered in any malicious ...
70 views

### Secure MAC implies that probability of same tags on different messages is negligible

So let any secure MAC (message authentication code) be given. Intuitively, I think it is clear that the probability of getting the same tag on two different messages is very small, i.e. negligible. I ...
480 views

### How do unkeyed hash functions (for MDCs) provide security?

Unkeyed hash functions are, by definition, hash functions computed without a key. SHA-1 is an example. MDCs (message digest codes) are a subclass of unkeyed hash functions. How are unkeyed hash ...