# All Questions

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### Random Coin Flip using ElGamal and a Trusted Party

An old exam question I am trying to figure out: Consider the following protocol for two parties to flip a fair coin. Trusted party T publishes her public key pk A chooses a random bit ...
640 views

### If the PSK is known, is it possible to decrypt traffic from other clients in a WPA2 wlan network?

If in a public WLAN WPA2-PSK is used, but the PSK is more or less publicly available, does this mean that an attacker with that PSK can easily decrypt wlan traffic from/to other clients of that WLAN? ...
3k views

### What are the details of the DES weakness of reusing the same IV in CBC mode with the same key?

I think I once faced the recommendation, that the initialization vector should always be random and never be used twice with the same key. How serious is this weakness? Also, is AES less effected ...
173 views

### Understanding Twist Security with respect to short Weierstrass curves

I'm trying to understand the "Invalid-curve attacks against ladders" section of SafeCurves Twist Security page and I have difficulties to apply it to short Weierstrass curves. That section claims ...
190 views

### Secure way to derive separate encryption and MAC keys from a single master key?

I want to derive a 256 bit encryption key and a 256 bit MAC key from a single 256 bit master key for an authenticated encryption scheme. I was considering the following construction to derive the two ...
403 views

### Description of signatures with message recovery (as in ISO/IEC 9796-2 and EMV Signatures)

I'd like to get an overview of how the signatures with message recovery work, especially in case EMV and other smart card systems. Is there a nice overview available without being required to read the ...
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### Should HMAC or NMAC or plain Keccak be used for a secure MAC?

After some digging around in the HMAC spec I found this (paraphrased): Step 1: If the length of Key equals the block size of the hash function (512 bits/64 Bytes for SHA-256), set the key equal ...
146 views

### Security of this deterministic encryption scheme

I recently came across a library that promises to do deterministic encryption with the following scheme: AES with 256 bit key in CBC mode with PKCS7 padding and Synthetic Initialization vector ...
547 views

### LFSR get output from characteristic polynomial?

Say you have a characteristic polynomial of an LFSR: $$f(X) = X^4 + X^3 + 1$$ How can I use this function f to get the output of the LFSR, given some initial state? Obviously I can create the LFSR ...
189 views

### Difference between lightweight, online and low memory Authenticated Encryption schemes

What is the basic difference between the following types of Authenticated Encryption (AE) schemes? Lightweight Authenticated encryption Online Authenticated Encryption Authenticated Encryption for ...
2k views

### Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange with Authentication: Man-in-the-Middle query

I have been reading up on MiTM attacks, and the prevention of them using public key certificates. Recently I learnt about Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange with Authentication, and how it uses signed ...
816 views

### Can a salt for a password hash be public?

For my understanding salts in password hashes are used to prevent the precomputation of $plaintext \to hashvalues$ (rainbow tables). I know from different threads, it is not necessary to keep the ...
466 views

### Elliptic Curve Encryption Ciphertext Size

I'd like to know how much bigger is the ciphertext when encrypting a message using ECC encrytpion? ECIES (or ElGamal)
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### Is there a cryptographic hash function that can be performed with pencil and paper?

Imagine I'm signing up for the 99th new web site this month. I somehow take my secret key (which I have written down on a card in my wallet) and the domain name of the site and feed them both into ...
267 views

### understanding pairing $e:G \times G \to G_T$ and ( Decision)BDH assumption

From DrLecter's comment, I know that DDH problem can be efficiently solved with this $$e(g^a,g^b)\stackrel{?}{=} e(g,g^z).$$ I have some trouble to understand this map $e:G \times G \to G_T$. Am I ...
318 views

### Why is the discrete log problem easy when the exponent comes from a binomial distribution?

I read in http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/7219/2/esorics06.pdf that in exponential El Gamal the discrete log problem for recovering $m$ from $g^m$ can be made tractable when $m$ is drawn from a binomial ...
416 views

### Attacking historical ciphers methodology

It's more a theoretical question of how would you approach it. All you know about the ciphertext it's was generated with a historical cipher. The ciphertext appears to be random, BUT it's divided into ...
278 views

### Are hash trees an alternative, quantum-resistant signature scheme which can replace RSA?

Can hash trees provide quantum resistant signatures to replace RSA for signing securely? What is the key size and how many times can we use same key?
Consider the following problem: given $g_1 \ldots g_i,h_1 \ldots h_i \in G$, $\forall i$ find $x_i$ such that $g_i^{x_i}=h_i$ For $i=1$ this is the discrete log problem and is assumed to to have ...