# All Questions

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### Is the polynomial reconstruction problem really “intractable”?

In the family of the believed (experts haven't come yet with a solution) intractable problems in cryptography belongs the Polynomial Reconstruction problem in which an attacker is given $n$ points in ...
2k views

### How does Scrypt use Salsa?

Bcrypt uses Blowfish to encrypt a derived key from the passphrase, and Blowfish is a cryptographic algorithm, but here it is said that: Note that Salsa20/8 Core is not a cryptographic hash ...
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### Extract private RSA key from USB cryptographic token using Bardou et al. attack (variant of “million message attack”)

There is a side channel attack on tamper-resistant USB cryptographic tokens using padding-oracle, described by Bardou, Focardi, Kawamoto, Simionato, Steel and Tsay, titled "Efficient padding oracle ...
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### Has it become easier to pre-compute tables after MD5 collisions?

Apparently it is not possible to compute all MD5 values from 0x00000000000000000000000000000000 to ...
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### Why is it a security problem that two RSA moduli are not co-prime?

I found this security problem, for example: Alice has an RSA public key: $e = 37$ and $\phi$ (totient, $N_A = (pa-1)(qa-1)$) is $55$, so the key is $(37, 55)$. Bob has an RSA public key: $e = 37$ ...
651 views

### Compare two hashes with different salt

I'm storing the salted hash of a credit card number in a database. What I'd like to be able to do is determine if two different entries in the same database correspond to the same credit card. ...
188 views

### Is my identity exposed when publishing my public key or encrypting with PGP?

Let's say I create my PGP keys with my appropriate name and email address. Will these personal information be exposed if I publish my public key? When I encrypt a message for sending it to my ...
177 views

### Does any public key crypto support and/or allow a 3rd party “control-key”?

My question is based on the following situation: Bob and Alice work for a company that expects them to exchange data encrypted. They could do so using regular public-key cryptography, but Joe (their ...
1k views

### SIMON implementation, decryption issues

I've been trying to implement the new SIMON block cipher in Ruby as a personal challenge. The spec didn't include a pseudocode version of the decryption but I thought I had it figured out. The code I ...
276 views

### Is there any weak message for an ECDSA signature?

Suppose ECDSA is used without hashing the message, but directly using a short message (say 10-bytes long) as the value z (using the definitions at ...
11k views

### AES 256 Encryption - Is it really easy to decrypt if you have the key?

So this might sound like a crazy question but bear with me for a minute. I can't find any info on the internet and so am here, although this might have been a good place to start. I've recently ...
305 views

### Toy encryption system that provides “hints”

I'm looking for a toy encryption system that has a specific property that when decrypting it with a key that is close enough to the key used in the encryption, it will produce some of the original ...
587 views

### Is it possible to actually verify a “sponge function” security claim?

When using a “sponge function” to create a cryptographic hash, we can look at the flat sponge claim, which flattens the claimed success probabilities of all attacks using a single parameter: the ...
218 views

### How can I tell which curve a given ECDSA implementation uses? (P-521 or something else)

I'd like to test and see if certain software uses P-521 ECC curves, or if it uses another variant. Without having access to the sourcecode, or the specification, is there any way for me to test which ...
324 views

### Polynomial multiplication and division in2^128

I want to multiply and divide polynomials, and implement the extended Euclidean algorithm for polynomial greatest common divisors, over a Galois Field of size $2^{128}$. Moreover, I want to use the ...
110 views

### Secure Sketch Construction

I would like a user to choose a point on an image which is represented by (x,y). This is meant to be a security token. When a user uses this location to login they are unlikely to to choose the exact ...
286 views

### How was 256-bit WEP cracked as well?

WEP is now considered as insecure. But how about the 256-bit WEP? Could someone explain why a 256-bit encryption isn't enough? 'A 256-bit WEP system is available from some vendors. As with the other ...
2k views

### AES: keylength and password length? [closed]

What is the difference between the keylength and the length of a password for AES-256?
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Why do people say that using hash twice or more is bad? yes there is key derivation that do that job, but in a low bandwidth network countries, the solution i see is to use a simple hashing system on ...
276 views

### Is this an acceptable authenticated encryption?

After much deliberation, I've decided to use a normal Encrypt-then-MAC scheme instead of an authenticated encryption mode such as GCM as authenticated encryption primitive. This is due to the lack of ...
301 views

### What is meant by $\tilde\Omega(\lambda^4)$?

I'm currently reading the paper (Leveled) fully homomorphic encryption without bootstrapping , and the following paragraph was near the start: What is meant by the symbol used? Is it merely to ...
122 views

### How difficult is it to find the “pre-image” of a block cipher?

Say that I have $$C_1 = AES_{k_1}(M_1)$$ How difficult would it be to find a key, K2 and plaintext M2 $$C_2 = AES_{k_2}(M_2)$$ such that $$C_1 == C_2$$ How would using a block cipher ...
311 views

### Using same AES-GCM setup for multiple packets?

Most cryptographic libraries I've encountered uses some variant of processPlaintext(...) and then doFinal() to produce the ...
229 views

### Parallel-resistant proof-of-work scheme?

I am looking for a proof-of-work scheme which cannot be effectively parallelized. For example, in hashcash (and by extension bitcoin) you have some collision-resistant hash function $f()$, a target ...
192 views

### Is generating public key inevitably slow in classic Diffie-Hellman if the private key is large?

Let's say I pick a 3000+ bit prime $p$ for which I also know that $q = (p - 1) / 2$ is a prime. If I've understood correct, then I can pick pretty much any $g$. Is generating $g^x$ now inevitably ...
458 views

### Hash function from narrower block cipher operated in CBC-encryption mode?

I am trying to build a public hash function (thus collision-resistant and preimage-resistant, and more generally behaving like a random oracle), with input a message $M$ of fixed size $|M|=m\cdot b$ ...
111 views

### Jumblar: Using map locations as passwords

I had the idea of converting map locations into passwords. Basically Jumblar takes a hash of the user's location and stores this as a comment on the PGP network. The 'stored-hash'(Vague-Hash) ...
440 views

### Is it possible to generate a 6-digit number using 256-bit encryption?

Reading through some documentation on a piece of software, it claims that a 4-6 digit number is created using a 256-bit encryption process for the purposes of access control. The whole process works ...
171 views

### repeated use of HKDF-extract on the same PRK

Regarding HKDF (RFC 5869) - HKDF has two steps, extract and expand. Some answers on this site suggest that you can extract once, and then generate multiple keys from the resulting PRK by multiple ...
164 views

### Why do fully homo-morphic constructions use 'ring' or 'lattice' structures?

Is there a significantly advantage to these data structures, or is it simply the status-quo and the easiest to use for describing constructions?
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### Why is asymmetric encryption IND-CPA?

According to Wikipedia, the IND-CPA game is: The challenger generates a key pair PK, SK based on some security parameter k (e.g., a key size in bits), and publishes PK to the adversary. The ...
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### Send a message to an entire group of recipients

I'm attempting to send a message to a group of recipients, through an untrusted intermediary. Each of the recipients will have been invited to the group by someone who already has a trusted public ...
140 views

### using random encrypted RSA challenge as key material

Assume a simple protocol for authentication - one side sends a randomly generated challenge string and encrypts it with RSA. The receiver decrypts it and replies with a hash of the challenge, proving ...
94 views

### Can CBC-encrypted files be modified in-place?

When changing a (small) part of the plaintext of a CBC-encrypted file, how much of the file will have to be rewritten? My suspicion is that everything after the modified block will have to be ...
488 views

### Physical analogue for MACs

What would be a good analogue with which to describe Message Authentication Codes to a person who has little to no understanding of cryptography? For instance, a vault is a reasonable analogue for ...
217 views

### Why is it said that if we have a duplicate ciphertext block it can leak our information?

I have been recently going through a question: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/15767/what-do-key-size-and-block-size-mean-in-cryptography and it created in me a series of doubts. Referring ...
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### is this authenticated key exchange protocol sound? too complicated? obviously flawed?

(significantly reworded this question to fit better into crypto.se). I have static RSA keypairs for both sides and an encrypted transport that needs symmetric keys, and need to exchange session keys. ...
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### Modes for encrypting small binary blobs?

Suppose I am building an encrypted document storage system. Suppose each user has a "user key": a symmetric key. Suppose each document is encrypted with a "document key". So, in order to give a ...
2k views

### How can scrypt be improved to counter GPU mining

I know scrypt was designed to lessen the GPU/ASIC advantage. We now have litecoin as a real-world example of this. However, it hasn't worked out perfectly. Most coins are mined by GPUs, although the ...
550 views

### why public key cryptography (RSA) is use in sites like Google, facebook (what is the need to ecode data in these sites)?

The RSA algorithm is used for encryption (plain text to cipher text) and decryption (cipher text to plain text) of data. What is the need for using public keys in these sites; why is data is encrypted ...
311 views

### How to prove a cipher resistant to differential cryptanalysis?

How do you prove that a cipher is resistant to differential cryptanalysis? It's said that Rijndael has been proven resistance to differential cryptanalysis. How do cryptographers do that?
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### Applications of 3-collisions

I recently read Improved Generic Algorithms for 3-Collisions by Joux and Lucks (Asiacrypt 2009), available as http://eprint.iacr.org/2009/305.pdf. I was wondering about applications of this technique ...
3k views

### Generating a secure random number in javascript

What I am trying to do is generate a large (4096bit) random number in JavaScript that is cryptographically safe to use. My approach is the following: I am creating a ...