# All Questions

328 views

### Is asynchronous perfect forward secrecy possible?

DH key agreement protocols require the participation of both parties, so are only suitable for synchronous connections. Is it possible to implement PFS in a fashion usable for asynchronous protocols, ...
410 views

### Building a hard to factor number without knowing its factorization

It is possible to find an efficient algorithm for constructing a provably hard to factor number $N$, together with a witness that shows that it is indeed hard to factor. EDIT, since it was not clear: ...
274 views

### 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. ...
74 views

### 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 ...
562 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 ...
313 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?
60 views

### 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 ...
126 views

### What prevents continued hashing of a key from being used as a cipher when xored with plaintext? [duplicate]

This is just an idea I had while looking through some threads so take it as you will. Given a plaintext of any length and a key that a specific hash function is capable of taking as input(I mention ...
173 views

### Are there any good examples of Contemporary Mechanical Cryptography?

Are there secure mechanical cryptosystems in use today? Not necessarily alphabetic either, ie digital but mechanical?
381 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 ...
342 views

### Primality testing (deterministic vs. non-deterministic)

I noticed that non-deterministic primality testing algorithms are more commonly used in practice while there is a deterministic algorithm e.g., AKS which runs in polynomial time? I am right? if so, ...
294 views

### How does NaCL Poly1305 implementation do modular multiplication?

The NaCL ref implementation of Poly1305 performs modular multiplication to calculate a polynomial $\mod 2^{130} - 5$ using the following modular multiplication ...
233 views

### Length of data to hash for PGP

I have finally managed to verify some simple PGP signed message blocks. However, I discovered that for some reason, my implementation limits me to verifying data that is 9-16 bytes long. no less. no ...
98 views

### Best hash size for hash trees

I want to know if having a 8-byte hash value is better than 16-byte hash value for use within hash trees. My mind tells me that the shorter the hash value, the better. But doesn't a smaller hash ...
74 views

### OpenPGP tag 18/19 description confusion Continuation [closed]

After coming back to try to finish more of my OpenPGP implementation, I refound one of my questions http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6021360/openpgp-tag-18-19-description-confusion that I am still ...
229 views

### IV and Headers inside cipher text

I am a bit confused about the use of IV, and key hash. Is the key hash and IV stored inside the headers of the cipher text? Isn't it a security risk to store this header information? By key hash I ...
545 views

### Review of AES encryption concept for an open source project

i'm working on an opensource project, A generator for static (html/js), password protected photo galleries. The generator AES 256 encrypts many images with the same key in PyCrypto, and decrypt them ...
393 views

### Four-Square cipher and its keyspace

Am I thinking about this correctly? Consider that the keyspace of the Playfair cipher is equivalent to all permutations of the alphabet, e.g. the number of distinct permutations of 25 objects, and ...
218 views

### The probability of finding a limited set of collisions for HMACSHA256

I need some input on the use of HMAC-SHA256 in an open source project, any help appreciated. The problem I'm solving is session fixation. We have a username, for that username we'd like to generate a ...
2k views

### Creating a PKCS#12 file where public key doesn't match the private key

For testing purpose, I want to create a PKCS#12 file in which the private key doesn't match the certificate. Is there any tool which will help me do this? If I use ...
514 views

### Homomorphic Encryption

Homomorphic Encryption (HE) which supports any function on ciphertexts is known as Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), while Partially Homomorphic Encryption (PHE) includes encryption schemes that ...
57 views

### CBC with random prefix but no IV - secure? [duplicate]

I'm looking at a datagram-based protocol that encrypts a payload. The payload is encrypted with AES or blowfish in CBC mode, and the result is then authenticated with a HMAC. To save space, the ...
464 views

### Is OpenPGP vulnerable to the “crypto doom principle”?

From reading RFC 2015 (MIME security with PGP), and from looking at the raw format of (GnuPG) encrypted and digitally signed email messages, it seems that first a signature is calculated from the ...
219 views

### Which area of Maths should I pursue?

I would like to know which area of Mathematics would be most beneficial to cryptography. Surely Algebraic Number Theory and maybe to a lesser extend, Elliptic Curves, are closely linked to ...
571 views

### Algorithm for proving Carmichael numbers

I have an application for determining if a number is a prime or not, currently I'm getting a random number, then doing the Fermat primality testing to find out if the number is probably prime (so this ...
200 views

### Selecting bijective functions for permutations

How would one go about selecting an appropriate bijective function for introducing permutations into a cipher or hash? For example, $f(x) = x+1 \space mod \space n$ is a bijective function, but isn't ...
174 views

### What parts of AES encryption result are safe to pass on the network

I'm using AES to encrypt the message. both sender and receiver know the passphrase, but only sender knows IV and salt I assume that receiver also needs to know IV and salt to decypher text; is it ...
355 views

### RSA padding: what is it and how does that work?

If I am not mistaken, plaintext RSA is not secure. So, I have read that padding and hashing is needed to make the RSA algorithm secure. However, I am confused on what does padding or armoring mean in ...
241 views

### Difference between actual attacks and theoretical attacks on SHA cryptographic series

Could anyone tell me what the difference is between a THEORETICAL ATTACK (Like the one done on SHA-1) and an actual attack (Like the one done on SHA-0). Is a theoretical attack a proposed method of ...
1k views

### Is it possible to change PGP / GPG Key Size on an exisiting key?

Is it possible for myself to change the key size (say from 2048 to 4096) on an EXISTING PGP / GPG key, and just republishing that key? Or do I have to generate a new key all together? I want to say ...
93 views

### BLS signatures in the G-valued Random Oracle Model

This paper on semi-generic algorithms considers "non-standard properties of the employed hash function". For BLS signatures whose main group is $G$, I'm curious what can be shown when the hash ...
230 views

### Are SSL modes with forward secrecy vulnerable to the BEAST attack?

From the original BEAST paper, it seems to me that you need the same session key when encrypting data, so you can check if the original plaintext block is the same as your chosen plaintext (which is ...
507 views

### How are Predicate Encryption algorithms implemented?

After a lot of reading on the internet, i can't seem to figure out how Predicate Encryption works. As i read, it consists of 4 algorithms: ...
186 views

### Is there a problem with this non-ECDSA message signing?

Is there a problem with signing a message like this? ...