# All Questions

11k views

### AES CBC mode or AES CTR mode recommended?

what's benefits and disadvantages of CBC vs CTR ? which one is more secure ?
726 views

### estimate of time required to crack sha512crypt password with JtR + OpenCL

OK, I have a shadow file with a password that I know, it is 4 letters followed by two numbers. Using John The Ripper with OpenCL support, on a laptop with AMD Radeon Mobility graphics, how long would ...
2k views

### LFSR for small numbers with large periods

I want to generate a few random numbers using an LFSR. However, the LFSR output depends on the number of taps, so for a large period I use large (relative) number of bits. This causes the numbers to ...
161 views

### elgamal based decryption mixnet

Can anybody help me to understand elgamal based decryption mixnet? Pure elgamal can be used in mixnet (re-encryption mixnet) and its very easy, and I have implemented decryption mixnet using RSA also. ...
201 views

### What does modular inversion mean?

I'm trying to implement an e-voting algorithm, which is described at the paper "Internet Voting Protocol Based on Improved Implicit Security" by Abhishek Parakh & Subhash Kak. At the Example 1 ...
547 views

### Is it safe to use file's hash as IV?

I'm encrypting some files using AES in CBC mode. I'm also using file's digest (SHA-1) to check that data is decrypted correctly (so I need to store it with file). Is it safe to use this digest as ...
216 views

### Two way encryption with random IV

I'm attempting to encrypt some information into our database to be later pulled back out and displayed to the user. Searching and reading up on different methods I found a post over at stack exchanged ...
328 views

### How do single use passwords work for an encrypted message

LastPass encrypts its data before sending it to their servers. The key for the data is generated using a combination of the master password and username. How then can a one-time password be used to ...
303 views

### Mental Poker with untrusted server (i.e. no peer to peer)

The question of implementing peer to peer mental poker has already been asked on stackoverflow. And there appears to be an implementation called LibTMCG. Also on this site a question was asked about ...
785 views

### Benefit of combining classical substitution ciphers with modern cryptography

I know that a simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher is considered extremely weak, on account of linguistic frequency-analysis attacks. However, assume the following: cleartext is encrypted ...
928 views

3k views

### Why do all SSH-RSA Keys begin with “AAAAB3NzaC1yc”?

My Friend and I have been generating a few ssh2-rsa keys and noticed that all the public keys began with "AAAAB3NzaC1yc". The similarity extended to "AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEA" between two keys I ...
2k views

### Deriving Keys for Symmetric Encryption and Authentication

So here's the concept. Rather than storing 2 keys and using a random IV, which presents its own problems (key rotation, ensuring no key is used in more than 2^32 cycles, sharing the keys, etc), is it ...
1k views

### Creating an encryption key from several other keys and using hash functions

I want to combine two or more keys to create a single encryption key that relies on all of them. What is the proper method for doing that? Simple XOR? Using hash functions? Something else? I ...
780 views

### Why can't I break ElGamal encryption by brute-forcing the secret exponent?

I am doing a course on cryptography on coursera and one of the topics covered was the ElGamal Encryption system. I am using the terms as defined in Wikipedia. Alice publishes $g$ and $g^x$. ...
1k views

### Using same keypair for Diffie-Hellman and signing

Are there any security risks using a single key-pair for both key-exchange and signing? I'm mainly interested in using Curve25519 for key-exchange and Ed25519 for signing. But similar combinations, ...
460 views

### Crypto USB Devices - where is the PIN/Password stored?

I am currently looking at the security of cryto USB drives for storing x509 certificates. I have one in possession currently. It can be read/written to using the Microsoft Crypto APIs. Anytime one ...
1k views

### Why is ciphertext from low entropy plaintext not compressible?

This comes following a discussion with a colleague. My plaintext file plain consists of a about 100,000 lines of "all work and no play...". It's size is: 2.2 MB. ...
190 views

### Where can I learn basic cryptography to know more about passwords and Bitcoin?

Basically my knowledge in passwords consist of setting up a Diceware master password back then, and I know hashes are not convertible back to the original password. Some basic question I want to know ...
441 views

### Why is RSA usually limited to messages up to 1 block

I'm wondering why RSA encryption usually is only used for messages that fit into one block. For larger messages hybrid encryption in combination with symmetric ciphers like AES seem to be the solution ...
415 views

### Simple homomorphic crypto for 32-bit integers

I'm looking for a simple way to perform homomorphic crypto on 32-bit integers. My only requirement is that I can add and subtract from the plaintext value without actually decrypting it. The crypto ...
2k views

### Is 512-bit RSA still safe for signature generation?

The standard CSP on Windows XP only supports RSA up to 512-bit, which means that it's the maximum key size I can use for authenticity verification of updates. The public key is embedded in the ...
456 views

### Properties of Ideal Straight P-Boxes

What properties should an ideal straight P-Box exhibit?
176 views

### Why not use CBC, not send IV, and assume first plaintext block is garbage? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: Using CBC with fixed IV Forgive me if this has been asked before, I looked but haven't seen any answers that suit. Is there any danger in using CBC, encrypting a ...
146 views

### High Power Computing for Crypto Research

Obviously, much of cryptography requires the assumption that adversaries have bounded computing power. So, I was wondering, are there any fields in cryptographic research for which high power ...
721 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 ...
259 views

### Does Grover's algorithm effect block size or only key size?

We know that Grover's algorithm can speed up cracking symmetric keys. Basically the key space is halved. This means we have to use at least a 256 bit key (to get 128 bit security). I heard somewhere ...
40 views

### Will length-extension work if secret is not prefixed but appended to the data? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: Why is h(m||k) insecure? Length-extension allows to append any data to the message while not knowing the secret. Any length-extension explaination one the web considers ...
927 views

### Do known-plaintext attacks exist for public key encryption?

In asymmetric ciphers we publish the public key for anyone, which means an attacker can encrypt any message they want and compare the ciphertext and plaintext without communicating with the owner of ...
448 views

### HMAC for short messages

I am using HMAC (hmac-sha256 to be precise) message authentication without encryption. My question is, is having a short message make it easy to determine what my secret key is? My C# code is as ...
131 views

### Needing to encrypt plain sight information

Okay here are my requirements. I need a solution that can do the following. Lets say I have an encrypted piece of text with the value "20". and I have UserA and UserB I give UserA the Keys (/5 and ...
138 views

### What's the strategy for future directions in cryptography? Bigger numbers/faster searching, or new methods, say, of factoring?

I'm taking a course in cryptography, and I would value any comments. This is not too technical a question, but more about directions or strategy in cryptography. My question is, is public key ...
3k views

### Why do block ciphers need a non-linear component (like an S-box)?

Why is there a requirement of "Non-Linear functions" as a component of many popular block ciphers (e.g. the S-box in DES or 3DES)? How does it make the cipher more secure? The only intuition I have ...
401 views

### DES key expansion: why are these two descriptions different?

I would like someone to explain me how to generate DES subkeys, because in the documentation that I saw, sometimes they say: "We rotate the initial key according to the number of iterations given ...
2k views

### Should I salt an AES password at each encryption?

I saw a sample code where the same password is salted with a different value (using PBKDF2) for each encryption. That means that the salt must be stored for each encrypted message. I don't understand ...
522 views

### Determining the algorithm used to generate a digital signature

I have a string "abcd pqrs". This string is digitally signed with an X.509 certificate (with its private key) and it produces a signature. From the signed string, is it possible to find out what ...
2k views

### Difference between symmetric and asymmetric hash function?

The Linux kernel supports symmetric and asymmetric hash functions. E.g. sha1, sha256, ... See tcrypt.c and search for test_hash_speed and ...
299 views

### Choosing good parameter for Lenstra's elliptic curve factorization

In Wikipedia, there is an article explaining Lenstra's factorization algorithm. As far as I got it, we choose some $e \in \mathbb{N}$ and a point $P$ on the curve and then calculate $eP$. While ...
149 views

### Public keys and their protocols

I'm having difficulties understanding exactly what this protocol means: $S \to D : \{N_S , S\}K_D$ $D \to S : \{N_S , N_D \}K_S$ $S \to D : \{N_D \}K_D$ "where $S$ represents the supervisor’s ...
204 views

### Future-Proof Versioning and Validation

I am working on a library (using standard primitives: AES256 CTR; HMAC with SHA256; PBKDF2 with SHA256, 128 bit salt, and 10000 rounds) to encrypt and decrypt data, given a password. The encrypted ...
10k views

### How to use RCON In Key Expansion of 128 Bit Advanced Encryption Standard

I have a question about RCON here is my illustration... this is the 128 bit key.. ...
192 views

### What are the cryptographic assumptions in the Dolev Yao model?

In the Dolev Yao model for interactive protocols, the cryptographic primitive (encryption, for example) is considered as a blackbox. Does blackbox here mean that the primitive is to be considered CPA ...
300 views

### Can Add and Multiply On Cipher Text achieve all operations?

A Fully homomorphic encryption scheme needs to support an evaluate function that can do add and multiply operations on cipher text. Can we do all kinds of complex operations on cipher text like ...
565 views

### Blind quantum computing and fully homomorphic encryption

I am somewhat familiar with current research on fully homomorphic enryption schemes and their possible application to Cloud computing. I've just noticed (somewhat late) that a marketing-savvy group ...
20k views

### Best way to reduce chance of hash collisions: Multiple hashes, or larger hash?

I would like to maintain a list of unique data blocks (up to 1MiB in size), using the SHA-256 hash of the block as the key in the index. Obviously there is a chance of hash collisions, so what is the ...
Suppose that $S=(E,D)$ is an additively homomorphic encryption scheme. Now I want to design a protocol $P$ such that given inputs $x_1,x_2,..,x_n$, the adversary $A$ (who can decrypt) can only learn ...