# All Questions

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### How to get the keyword from a keyword cipher?

I was given a ciphertext and now I am trying to break it via looking for the keyword. This is a keyword cipher. So: PlainEnglish: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ If ...
4k views

### In the SHA hash algorithm, why is the message always padded?

In the SHA hash algorithm the message is always padded, even if initially the correct length without padding; the padding is of the form "1" followed by the necessary number of 0s. Why is it ...
657 views

### Replay attack prevention under strict conditions

Say I have a request-response protocol and the task to make it immune to replay attacks. The requirements are as follows: The defense mechanism cannot rely on the clocks of the parties. The defense ...
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### When to prefer exchanging cryptographic certificates over exchanging only public keys?

Let's think of the following case: A group of peers want to exchange messages with each other. They use public-key cryptography to sign and encrypt messages. Anyone with any name can join the ...
2k views

### Is every output of a hash function possible?

Is every output of a hash function (e.g. SHA1, MD5, etc) guaranteed to be possible, or, conversely, are there any output values that cannot possibly be created from any input? If so, what guarantees ...
228 views

### Safely use CryptSignAndEncryptMessage?

I am developing an application that sends messages which I want to encrypt and sign. The CryptoApi offers a function called CryptSignAndEncryptMessage. The description says, what this function ...
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### are CFB and OFB really meant for streaming?

CFB, OFB and other modes are meant for streaming and don't require padding. Are there still limitations such as the text needs to be greater than key length?
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### Is quantum key distribution safe against MITM attacks too?

i read this recently: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12786-quantum-cryptography-to-protect-swiss-election.html and some parts of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_key_distribution ...
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### Cryptographic Algorithm/Protocol needed

I am trying to achieve the following: Encrypted files are stored on users filesystem. The user uses my client to authenticate against a server. Once he is authenticated successfully he gets a token ...
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### Applying multiple hash functions to improve security? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: Guarding against cryptanalytic breakthroughs: combining multiple hash functions I'm a total newb to cryptography but after reading what I've read about it, I had a ...
2k views

### What alphanumeric string length can be used to guarantee no hash collisions from CRC-64?

If I'm hashing alphanumeric strings (chars in the set 0-9, a-...
3k views

### In which order are the round keys used during AES decryption?

In the Add Round Key step in AES decryption, which part of the expanded key will I XOR first to the result of the SubBytes step? Is it the 10th round key? For example, is this the right order? ...
200 views

### RSA/DSA: Wouldn't it make sense to sign using decoding the data hash?

Why is encoding using the private key used for signing? Wouldn't it make sense to keep the premise, that private is for decoding and public is for encoding? i.e. create a hash and threat it as a ...
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### How were the AES key and block length subsets of Rijndael selected?

My intuition tells me it's a trade off between speed and security, but how did the standardisation process select these three seemingly arbitrary key lengths (namely, AES-128, AES-192, AES-256).
5k views

### Initialization vector length insufficient in AES

I use AES with AES/CBC/PKCS5Padding with the following encryption and decryption code sections in Java: ...
3k views

### Why DSA cannot be used for encryption?

Here it is mentioned that DSA cannot be used for encrypt. But Both RSA and DSA can be used to generate public and private keys, right? (Or am I wrong?). Then why can't I use the DSA public key to ...
3k views

### Encryption with “constant” initialization vector considered harmful

I try to get the full reasoning behind the above statement. First, after reading articles here and at wikipedia i understand that using an IV only once is good practice. For stream ciphers not doing ...
947 views

### Do Rabin Fingerprints have any advantages over CRC?

Background In both, bitstrings are interpreted as a polnomical over GF(2) and they each can be used to implement a hash over a sliding window. The definitions of each are as follows: Rabin ...
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### How to enhance randomness of AES?

I'm using PHP to encrypt a string and Java to decrypt it on a remote server. To perform the encryption, I'm using the strategy that can be found here. My problem is that the strings I encrypt are ...
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### How can we find Public key have only 8 or 16bits? How many messages does Eve need to know the Public key in RSA?

Suppose Alice sends messages to Bob by encrypting the messages with Bob's public key. Eve knows that the data is encrypted using RSA, but does not know the public key. Can Eve figure out the public ...
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### How can disk encryption systems (like Truecrypt) resist frequency analysis when they allow random access?

I don't understand how disk encryption (e.g. TrueCrypt) is supposed to resist frequency analysis. If blocks can be randomly accessed (which they can), doesn't that mean that frequency-domain ...
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### Order of hashing concatenation

A = hash("blue" + X); B = hash("pink" + X); If A and the literals are known and X is unknown, are there attacks on B aside from the attacks on directly on hash()? ...