# All Questions

112 views

### Does a dynamic accumulator exist yet? [closed]

I’m looking for a one-way accumulator which can safely add new members (deletion is not necessary) and does not rely on a trusted party in any way. I’ve been looking for one, I need it for this ...
111 views

### What is the importance of the $r$ and $c$ values for the Sponge Construction?

What is the importance of the $r$ and $c$ values? Keccak[r=1600,c=0] is stated on a calculator on the Keccak website to be a checksum. But I figured if c=0, then there's only one possible output? ...
277 views

### Is this a secure (and correct) sign-then-encrypt technique for transferring messages?

After reading some information on the way iMessage works I have been working on writing some code to try my hand at securely transferring messages in a similar manner and I wanted to confirm that the ...
489 views

### Is the term “Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem” a misnomer?

I have just started studying Elliptic Curve Cryptography, and I have this doubt. In ECC the group operation is addition (and not multiplication). So, why is ECDLP stated as a variation of the discrete ...
437 views

### Why concatenate the key a second time in HMAC? [duplicate]

On Wikipedia it is said that HMAC is basically (without taking into account padding): $H(key\ \Vert\ H(key\ \Vert\ message))$ where $\Vert$ denotes concatenation. I understand the need to hash ...
118 views

543 views

### How do the following new (2013) ECC curves compare in security or efficiency? [closed]

I read about the following "safe" ECC curves and notably, secp256 and all the NIST curves are marked as "unsafe" when compared to more modern curves. I need a curve for signing or encryption, (or ...
136 views

### Problem implementing MixBytes functionality in Groestl

Disclaimer: School work. I am trying to implement Groestl through Java, and have got stuck on the MixBytes section which can be found here section 3.4.5 page 11. As per the description of matrix ...
176 views

### Meet in the middle attack - message and key

I clearly understand the story of Alice and Bob: Alice and Bob are going to use double DES. They know the keys K1 and K2. Alice sends to Bob the encrypted message c= EK1(EK2(m)). Bob decrypts the ...
411 views

### What prevents a padding standard to cause a data loss?

In here different byte padding standards are listed as ANSI X.923, ISO 101.26, PKCS7, ISO/IEC 7816-4 and zero padding. All of them seems to apply padding to the last byte blocks. Odds are rare but ...
448 views

### Hash Based Encryption (fast & simple), how well would this compare to AES? [duplicate]

First of all, I know it's a very bad idea to invent your own encryption algorithm. It's better to use existing known, trusted, extensively tested and studied algorithms with a proven track record. The ...
210 views

### Hash Based Encryption (fast & simple), how well would this compare to AES? [duplicate]

First of all, I know it's a very bad idea to invent your own encryption algorithm. It's better to use existing known, trusted, extensively tested and studied algorithms with a proven track record. The ...
2k views

### Randomness test question from FIPS 140-1 and comparison with 140-2

In FIPS 140-1 there are 4 statistical random number generator tests (The Monobit Test, The Poker Test, The Runs Test and The Long Runs Test. Then FIPS 140-2 came along and supposedly tightened the ...
2k views

### Why does Openssh use only SHA1 for signing and verifying of digital signatures?

I am learning SSH protocol. With my current understanding of SSH protocol, I think that message digest algorithms for using in digital signature should be derived from Key Exchange. But Openssh ...
214 views

### Should different key pairs be used for signing and encryption?

In the recent iOS Security white paper from Apple (February 2014), the section on iMessage discusses using two different asymmetric key types as part of its standard operation: When a user turns ...
151 views

### Why do we apply the concept of circuit in homomorphic encryption schemes?

I am a beginner to the concept of homomorphic encryption. One thing that makes me very confused is why we use the circuit concept or approach to homomorphic encryption. Gentry's paper does not discuss ...
2k views

### Difference between known-plaintext attack and forward search attack

I am looking at the different attacks on RSA. I came across known-plaintext attack where the public key can be used to encrypt all possible messages until it finds a match on the sent encrypted ...
421 views

### Difference RSA keypair creation openSSL and openPGP?

Creating a 2048bits RSA keypair I figured that doing this using openssl takes as an input 32bytes of "randomness" from ...
226 views

### How can I create an RSA modulus for which no one knows the factors?

It's easy to create an RSA modulus where almost no one knows the factors: for example, I can generate two 1024-bit primes $p$ and $q$ and set $n=pq$. If I publish $n$, I will be the only person in ...
247 views

### Question on RSA trapdoor permutation

You plan to use a public-key cryptosystem based on the RSA trapdoor permutation in three different real-life applications, in which the attacker has, respectively, only one of the following resources: ...
181 views

### Verifying multiplicative inverse on a prime field in NIST's ECDSA_Prime.pdf

I am trying to learn about the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) by verifying the results in some example calculations. I found a PDF of example ECDSA calculations from NIST here: ...
169 views

### Trying to calculate the strength of a Bitcoin brain wallet created with a custom diceware password

I want to create a brain wallet using a custom diceware since I don't like the original one. Instead of 7776 words it has 46656 because I use 6 dice for each word instead of 5, and also it only has ...
680 views

### RSA problem if i choose two specific small prime numbers?

I know that rsa normally is made to make it with big integers, but i trying to make the algorithm myself (with the help of wikipedia) and I´m making it with small numbers to track the problems easily. ...
1k views

### Elliptic Curves of different forms

Looking at http://safecurves.cr.yp.to/ to find a safe curve, I find that most curves described here are of a different form from that generally used. In Bouncy Castle, for example, ...
55 views

### Affine encryption function

Let $f(x) = ax + b$ be an affine encryption function. $a$ and the cardinal of the field of our keys $K$ (in English, 26) must be coprime so that the encryption ...
592 views

### Reusing AES-CTR Keys and IVs for File Encryption

I’m implementing some file encryption module with random-access capability and AES-CTR seems the right way to go. I understand that reusing Keys and IVs can expose the file to ‘Stream Cipher Attacks’ ...
216 views

### What functions allow for practical indistinguishability obfuscation?

Recently, there has been a major theoretical breakthrough in program obfuscation, in the area of indistinguishability obfuscation. Background: Indistinguishability obfuscation is a form of program ...
158 views

### Obfuscating point-like functions

There are standard schemes for obfuscating a point function; I'm wondering if we know how to obfuscate a slight generalization of a point function. I'll elaborate more precisely. Definition 1. A ...
205 views

### Selection of cryptographic functions for OAEP

I can't understand how the "cryptographic functions" are to be selected RSA + OAEP which are used in OAEP. How to choose these "cryptographic functions"(G and H)?
166 views

### Is there need for message authentication if a public key is transmitted and then used to encrypt a symmetric key?

First I'd like to note that I'm really a beginner at cryptography, and while this interests me and while I have researched it in the past few months, there is still a lot of things that simply aren't ...
237 views

### Traitor-tracing PRF

I'm looking for a pseudorandom function (PRF) with "traitor-tracing" properties. More specifically, I'd like there to be multiple equivalent keys, so I can give different parties different keys, but ...
89 views

### Group membership with unique anonymous claims

Is it possible to accomplish the following scheme? There is a Server (S) and many clients. Each client enrolls with S, exposing its real identity; S saves the real identity information in its ...
198 views

### Are there use cases where a signature itself needs to be signed?

I'm writing some code to digitally sign certain files (JSON, if you must know), and I'm trying to understand the use cases, not being a crypto guy myself. I understand there are use cases where ...
829 views

### AES encryption takes more time to decrypt than encrypt

I am trying to find how much time an AES encryption and decryption takes for a given amount of data and key. In all the cases encryption takes way lesser processing time than decryption. I tried to ...
153 views

### Changing a bit Changes Hash

I am very curious on the fact that SHA, MD5 and all related Hash Functions change the output even by changing one bit in input Message. Why is that?
174 views

### counter to indicate hotp count

I was trying to figure out how HOTP kept from wrapping over, when I saw this explanation of how it works, by Thomas Pornin [source]: The intended scenario is the following: the client has a ...
601 views

### Can a monoalphabetic substitution cipher attain perfect secrecy?

Can a monoalphabetic substitution cipher attain perfect secrecy? Definition of perfect secrecy: $${\rm Pr}[\,{\rm Enc}_k(m_1) = c\,] = {\rm Pr}[\,{\rm Enc}_k(m_2) = c\,]$$
2k views

### Why does SHA-1 have 80 rounds?

Why does SHA-1 algorithm have exactly 80 rounds? Is it to reduce collisions? If yes, then why do SHA-2 and SHA-3 have a lower number of rounds?
503 views

### distribution for a subset of md5

I need to uniquely assign a 32 bit integer to a collection of human readable strings (i.e. they will not be generated with hash collision in mind). I don't expect more than a few thousand strings. I ...
98 views

### How does the key size per data bit influence the security?

The likelihood of breaking, for instance, an AES-128 cipher is 100% after $2^{128}$ tries in brute force, meaning that I've got to try $2^{128}$ keys to certainly break it. What if I (hypothetically) ...
176 views

### Would a symmetric cipher with a keylength a big as the data length be information theoretically secure?

One-Time-Pad is information theoretically secure as long as the random number stream is evenly long or longer than the data stream it encrypts, for a "decyphered" message could have been any message ...
700 views

### How do I convert the definition of E-521 into a curve definition a la Bouncy Castle?

I am currently trying to create an ECCCurve for E-521. Unfortunately, it is not currently a named curve in the library I am using, so I will have to define it manually. I am using the definition of ...
110 views

### Where did Martin Hellman acknowledge Ralph Merkle's contribution to public-key cryptography?

I am trying to find the article to reference when discussing the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. According to Wikipedia Hellman said that The system...has since become known as Diffie–Hellman key ...
1k views

### Mapping of message onto elliptic curve and reverse it

I would like to perform a variant of Elliptic Curve ElGamal in java using the BouncyCastle libraries. I currently face the difficulty of mapping a message $m$ onto the elliptic curve $E_p$. I have so ...
111 views

### Terminology: What is the word describing a hash key, a crypto key, and a certificate?

If I want to check the integrity of some piece of data, I can check that a cryptographic hash of the data corresponds to a known hash. Alternatively I can also check a digital signature on the data ...
210 views

### How can I show that the DDH problem is self-reducible?

I have trouble to understand how I can show that the Decisional Diffie-Hellman problem (DDH) is self-reducible. I found this as a description of a random self-reducible problem. ...
160 views

### Modular exponentiation with Chinese Remainder Theorem

I'm learning modular exponentiation with Chinese remainder theorem. I found a great answer from below How can I use eulers totient and the chinese remainder theorem for modular exponentiation? But I ...