# All Questions

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### What is a hard-core predicate?

I read this article on Wikipedia: Hard-core predicate. Still I don't understand what exactly is a hard-core predicate. Is it possible to put this in simple English terminology, and perhaps with a ...
462 views

### What is the MD5 collision with the smallest input values?

I am interested in MD5 collisions for small input messages. The collision examples given at http://www.mscs.dal.ca/~selinger/md5collision/ show two different strings, where only a tiny amount of data ...
2k 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 ...
426 views

### Given a message and signature, find a public key that makes the signature valid

Given a message $M$ and a signature $S$, is it feasible to find a RSA public key $(n,e)$ such that $S$ verifies as a valid signature on $M$ (using this public key)? What if we're given one public key ...
5k views

### Why is triple-DES using three different keys vulnerable to a meet-in-the-middle-attack?

Among other sources, this wikipedia entry states that triple DES using three seperate keys (k1, k2, k3) is vulnerable to meet-in-the-middle-attacks, while triple DES using only two keys (k1, k2, k1) ...
328 views

### Can one have an authentic, but repudiable, message without a previously shared secret?

Bob wants to send a message to Alice, such that Alice can be sure that the message came from Bob, but can't prove it to anyone else. If I understand right, this means that the same message could have ...
929 views

### What is the difference between a hash and a permutation?

As defined by Wikipedia a hash function is [...] any algorithm or subroutine that maps large data sets of variable length to smaller data sets of a fixed length. For example, a person's name, ...
523 views

### How to best obtain bit sequences from throwing normal dice?

Throwing normal dice, one can get sequences of digits in [0,5]. Which is the best procedure in practice to transform such sequences into bit sequences desired?
1k views

### Why was ISO10126 Padding Withdrawn?

Wikipedia mentions ISO10126 Padding has been withdrawn, but doesn't say why. Also there were no news reports about this, as far as I can see. Why was it withdrawn? Are there security flaws? Is there ...
214 views

### Does the position of the salt improve its effectiveness when hashing?

Seems most documentation I have read suggests the salt should prefix the value to be hashed. Is this just for consistency, or is the salt more effective when prefixed?
2k views

### What alphanumeric string length can be used to guarantee no hash collisions from CRC-64?

If I'm hashing alphanumeric strings (chars in the set 0-9, a-...
1k 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 ...
311 views

### Is it a requirement to understand mathematics when implementing (or breaking) cryptography?

Related: What is the lowest level of mathematics required in order to understand how encryption algorithms work? and Recommended skills for a job in cryptology In the context of putting crypto into ...
237 views

### Is pairing based cryptography ready for productive use?

I'm currently testing one among those many interesting cryptographic protocols based on bilinear maps. It's quite hard to understand the underlying fundamentals, especially since there are several ...
251 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 ...
2k views

### AES plaintext is smaller than 128 bits - how to expand?

We are currently developing a little AES implementation in a crypto-course at university. As far as I know, AES uses a 128 bit block length, so all data that will be encrypted gets split up into ...
474 views

### Are there any secure commutative ciphers?

This answer lists two commutative cipher algorithms - Pohlig-Hellman and SRA. However, they don't appear to be too secure. My question is, here there any commutative ciphers out there that are secure ...
1k views

### How and why can a decryption program tell me that a key is incorrect?

I have noticed that some programs used for file encryption will tell you if an entered key is wrong when you try to decrypt. It seems (to me at least) that this would mean that the key somehow is ...
502 views

### Is there a practical zero-knowledge proof for this special discrete log equation?

We have a multiplicative cyclic group $G$ with generators $g$ and $h$, as in El Gamal. Assume $G$ is a subgroup of $(\mathbb{Z}/n\mathbb{Z})^*$. There are two parties, Alice and Bob: Alice knows: ...
603 views

### Can I jettison MAC if I already have SHA1(M)?

I'm currently using SSL with AES-CBC and HMAC for a file transfer containing string M. Now suppose Alice already knows SHA1(M) (and the adversary does not), and she downloads M from Bob using only ...
11k views

### Does the SHA hash function always generate a fixed length hash?

I'm using the SHA1/2 family of algorithms for a particular project. I was wondering if all the SHA algorithms return a fixed length hash regardless of the length of the data.
857 views

### Is PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA1 really broken?

I just read through this article which demonstrates practical (and seemingly trivial) collisions in PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA1, and provides a few examples of collisions. Am I missing something here? Is ...
387 views

### RSA Encryption and Signature - Weak Padding

Assume that I have an plaintext $m$ and it is padded with $randompad||00||m$ and then it is encrypted with RSA and a public encryption key so we get the encrypted $Sm$. Then to assure its integrity ...
509 views

### Convert old and busted password encryption to something sensible

Given a TOTALLY HYPOTHETICAL scenario in which passwords for over a million accounts in over 200 databases have been stored using 3DES, a key derived from a (single) MD5 hash of a customer-controlled ...
547 views

### Is there an authenticated encryption scheme where the recipient can attribute the message to a single sender?

With a standard authenticated encryption scheme (or MAC), Alice and Bob share a symmetric key. When Alice sends something to Bob, Bob can check that it is authentic. At that point, Bob can deduce ...
2k views

### Do I have to recompute all hashes if I change the work factor in bcrypt?

The well-known article about why we should use bcrypt for hashing passwords mentions the work factor - some parameter to the algorithm that determines how long one hashing should be in terms of number ...
4k views

### Which one of the Block Cipher modes is the best?

I have two questions regarding the Block Cipher Modes: Which one of the modes is considered the best? I know CBC has a problem of IV since the next block of the plain text is XORed with the result ...
145 views

### Why do we encrypt-then mac but sign-then-encrypt?

This question was asked in comments on my answer to should we sign then encrypt or encrypt then sign. I think posing the question as a separate entity is best, so: The general advice for applying ...
249 views

### How to calculate entropy of a combined key

I know how to calculate the entropy of a key that relates to its selection process. For example if the key space is $1000$, entropy of a randomly chosen key is $1000$. Suppose now you have two keys ...
386 views

### Hide a weakness in ECC by choosing the prime or one of the curve coefficients

Suppose you are given a value $c$. Can you find a prime $p$ and an integer $b$ such that the elliptic curve $$E: y^2 \equiv x^3 -3x + b \pmod p$$ is cryptographically weak? You need to choose ...
245 views

### Why not encrypt salt?

Assuming I had to distribute salt+ciphertext together over an insecure channel, isn't it better to store the salt encrypted? By encrypted I mean with a block cipher and with key and IV derived from ...
971 views

### How does SafeNet MobilePASS generate passwords?

We use MobilePASS at work but the latest version of the android client seems to be buggy so I wanted to have a go at implementing the algorithm myself. You can download the client to play with here: ...
420 views

### Attack on DSA with signatures made with k, k+1, k+2

For homework, I'm asked to find the private key, $x$, in a DSA digital signature scheme. In the particular instance, we are given the parameters $p$, $q$ and $g$, the public key $g^x$, 3 messages ...
7k views

### Where i can find an AES implementation in python?

Where i can find a "reviewed" version of AES implementation in python. Not an API like PyCrypto whereby you can call AES algorithms in a single line.
3k views

### RSA Proof of Correctness

Can anyone provide an extended (and well explained) proof of correctness of the RSA Algorithm? And why is it needed? I can't say that this or this helped me much, I'd like a more detailed and newbie ...
3k views

### How can I convert a DER ECDSA signature to ASN.1?

I having trouble verifying an ECDSA signature signed using client side javascript with Java/BouncyCastle. The javascript signing function source: ...
738 views

### Implementing secret reconstruction in Shamir's Secret Sharing

I am trying to implement Shamir's secret sharing in C++. I have got the generation of shares working. However, I am very confused with the reconstruction of shares. I get the part on how three users ...
537 views

### Tools for modelling and analysis of cryptographic protocols

I am designing some cryptographic protocols and I am new to it. Are there any well-known tools that can be used to model and design these protocols? And also verify or analyze their validity? If not ...
283 views

### One-way function and factoring

I am confused about the hardness of the one-way function behind cryptography -- if someone could factor the large number produced back into two primes quickly then the one-way function would be ...
1k views

### Is HTTPS secure if someone snoops the initial handshake?

Let's say I'm on an open wireless network that's being actively sniffed and I connect to an HTTPS site. Even though my subsequent traffic is encrypted, couldn't the sniffer use the data from the ...
825 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

### Why do new versions of TLS use an explicit IV for CBC suites?

SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0 used an insecure scheme to generate implicit IVs when encrypting records in CBC mode: they used the last part of the previous record, a value that can be predicted by the attacker. ...
893 views

I developed a p2p-app in C# which sends and receives encrypted text messages (50KB). For encryption, my app uses AES 128 bit in CBC cipher mode. For each message it uses a new randomly-generated IV. ...
886 views

### Are NIST's changes to Keccak/SHA-3 problematic?

NIST is working on standardizing SHA-3. They have selected Keccak as the basis for SHA-3, and they plan to make some small changes to it; the result (with NIST's changes) will be standardized as ...
1k views

### Does the elliptic curve (EC) cryptosystem outperform RSA and DL cryptosystems?

Throughout the literature, it is stated that EC cryptosystems outperform RSA and Discrete logarithm cryptosystems, but I cannot understand how ECC would be more efficient than RSA and DL in terms of ...
2k views

### At the current time, is SHA256 the de facto standard for strong cryptographic hashes?

At the current time, is SHA256 the de facto standard for strong cryptographic hashes? From what I am seeing of more sites utilizing it, I would suppose the answer to this is yes, but would like to ...
687 views

### Which blind signature schemes exist, and how do they compare?

I'm looking into blind signature schemes for use as digital cash. I have come across blinded RSA, and Lucre(DH based). Are there other schemes available, and how do they compare? I suspect there ...
972 views

### How does the MOV attack work?

What exactly is the MOV attack, how does it actually work, and what is it used for? It's explained briefly here and I'd like to know what it is more / what is it fully used for.