All Questions

353 views

Does adding a salt to the message before HMAC processing add any security?

An HMAC function is designed to verify message integrity, i.e., that the message has not been tampered with. It is generally (always?) implemented by using a hashing function ...
814 views

When only using one-way hashing, is it possible to tell the number of characters changed between the old and new password?

The other day when changing my password on a Solaris 10 system I was surprised that Solaris was able to detect that I hadn't changed enough characters between the new and current passwords. MINDIFF ...
183 views

What exactly does a key do?

I am getting to grips with cryptography as a total newbie, and am struggling with encryption "keys" and how to visualize them. From http://computer.howstuffworks.com/encryption.htm/printable: ...
138 views

How is this affine function a pair wise independent permutation?

Can anybody explain how the below is true ? $I_n$ denotes the set of all n-bit strings, ${\{0,1\}}^n$. (..) Let $A$ be a finite field then the permutation $f_{(a,b)}(x) = a \cdot x + b$, ...
753 views

An unpredictable PRG is secure (Theorem Yao'82)

in the Mr Boneh's online course is stated the following theorem: Let $G:K \to \{0,1\}^n$ be a PRG. “Thm”: if $\forall i \in \{0, … ,n-1\}$ the PRG $G$ is unpredictable at pos. $i$, then $G$...
342 views

How does Web Cryptography API produce secure PRNG?

How does Web Cryptography API (eg window.crypto.getRandomValues) produce secure PRNG? Specifications: https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webcrypto-api/raw-file/tip/spec/Overview.html#RandomSource-interface ...
142 views

Simplification of a pairing

The paper Expressive, Efficient, and Revocable Data Access Control for Multi-Authority Cloud Storage contains the following simplification: e(C_i,\text{GPK}_{uid})\cdot e(D_i, K_{\rho(i),uid})\...
12k views

The modulus of RSA public key

I am studying the RSA cryptosystem. The public key consists of $(n, e)$, the modulus (product of two large primes), and the encryption exponent. I want to separate the modulus $n$ and exponent $e$. A ...
47 views

Malicious KGC attack in the identity-based authenticated key exchange protocol

There are two users $A$ and $B$ who are in different domain. Let's assume that $A\in KGC_1$ and $B\in KGC_2$. If they want to establish secure session, then they must run an identity-based ...
156 views

Deterministic Rand function for Winternitz One Time Signatures

Suppose you are implementing a Generalized Merkle Signature Scheme, using the Winternitz One-Time Signature Scheme for the node signatures. Furthermore, suppose the implementation is to be stateless (...
471 views

Adi Shamir's secret database of all primes

I was going through these presentation slides (PDF) on Crypto 2013. It summarizes the paper, Factoring RSA keys from certiﬁed smart cards: Coppersmith in the wild. In the last slide, it was ...
130 views

Comparing n-multiple amount of merkle trees?

I would like to know what best steps are there in finding differences between a high order amount of merkle tree's or if a better associative structure should be used. I ask this questions because ...
149 views

Convergent encryption has dictionary attack, but why hash function doesn't?

Convergent encryption (CE), $E_k(d)$, is a way to encrypt the data $d$, with the characteristic that the encryption key $k$ is $k=h(d)$, where $h(\cdot)$ is a cryptographic hash function. Consider a ...
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Can a homomorphic encryption scheme be made CCA2 Secure?

Is it possible to modify a homomorphic encryption scheme so that it can be CCA2 secure? From the definition of a homomorphic scheme, it seems that it is malleable, which would result in lack of CCA2 ...
87 views

Feasible way to check n-dimensional equidistribution of PRNGs

I am currently gathering some test methods and test suites for random number generator qualities, and am a bit stuck at finding something feasible to test for n-dimensional equidistribution. As input ...
891 views

Problem with Python Implementation of Key Exchange part OTR Protocol

Being new to software development and crypto in general, I thought I would write a simple p2p encrypted chat app using the otr protocol detailed here: https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/Protocol-v3-4.0.0.html ...
204 views

Math to replace s-boxes - Good or bad idea?

The following was going through my brain for the past week. If my thoughts are generally known to the cryptographic community would someone provide a link or two. Even if I’m making a classic newbie ...
233 views

Is a keyed PRF a MAC?

I remember I read that a MAC can be considered as a PRF. Can a variable-length input keyed-PRF be considered as a MAC?
455 views

Determine LFSR phase quickly?

I know it's possible with work backwards from the output bits of an LFSR to determine its feedback polynomial in a O(n) fashion. I'm also curious if, given an LFSR state and polynomial, is it ...
105 views

Client authentication on limited hardware

I'm developing a authentication and authorization protocol for a Bluetooth device. The device should communicate with an Android app and needs to be able to authenticate the app during the connection ...
655 views

Attacks on AES-128 (ECB) based on some knowledge of plaintext

I'm working with a third party protocol which employs AES-128 in ECB mode of operation to encrypt a packet composed of 16-byte blocks (it encrypts each block independently). I'm trying to determine if ...
143 views

Does OpenTSA support PKCS11 to talk to HSMs?

We are planning to implement the time-stamping service (RFC 3161) using OpenTSA wanted to know: Does OpenTSA support PKCS-11 (Cryptoki) to talk to HSMs? BTW: I did not find documentation or much ...
625 views

generate hash of all handshake messages for verify data (DTLS)

I am trying to create a DTLS client finished packet, where I need to generate verify data for handshake hash is need. And here I want to know how to generate handshake hash. As of now I am doing like ...
90 views

Types of cryptography

We have cryptography based on hard problems from number theory, like DDH. When we speak about symmetric cryptography with AES, a mode of encryption (CBC, ...), what is the type of problem ? What is ...
406 views

Exactly two of the four roots must be greater than N/2

Theorem: Let $y$ be a quadratic residue in $\mathbb{Z}_N$* where $N=pq$. There are exactly four integers $x_1, x_2, x_3, x_4$ where $0 < x_1 < x_2 < \frac{N}{2} < x_3 < x_4 < N$ ...
850 views

Pi Message Encryption [duplicate]

I created a simple yet efficient message encrypting page that will encrypt messages using Pi. Though not being an expert in this area, I am nowhere near sure how secure this is and how easy it would ...
467 views

Encrypting text file line by line with stable encryption

I want to store files in a secure manner (i.e. no one should be able to decrypt the contents of the file without the secret key) but I also want a diff tool to be able to show me which lines changed (...
1k views

Is there a standard way to use a nonce with HMAC?

Many protocols use HMAC on messages that include a nonce, but they don't seem to do it in a consistent way. For example, in OAuth the nonce is in the middle of an URL-encoded key-value string, like ...
363 views

How to find out the method used to encrypt [closed]

How to find out the method used to encrypt the string 123456 which results in the value: 6g9SkDLIKa8l2VhafFnHvg==?
616 views

Choice of multiplication polynomial in Rijndael s-box affine mapping

The Rijndael specification details the design choices for the s-box in section 7.2. They describe the choice of affine mapping as follows: We have chosen an affine mapping that has a very simple ...
2k views

Does collision resistance imply (or not) second-preimage resistance?

I've seen contradictory results. Sometimes hash functions are collision-resistant but not necessarily second-preimage resistant. I've seen this kind of things in papers from Bart Preneel: “Security ...
169 views

Condensed ElGamal + AES

In normal ElGamal encryption, the encrypted message is a pair (gb, gabM) - that is, the actual "encryption" is simply multiplication by the shared secret ...