# All Questions

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### Does the generator size matter in Diffie-Hellman?

For the Diffie-Hellman protocol I've heard that the generator 3 is as safe as any other generator. Yet, 32-bit or 256-bit exponents are sometimes used as generators. What is the benefit of using ...
9k views

### Differences Between White-Box Cryptography and Code Obfuscation

I have been reading the question "What is a white-box implementation of a cryptographic algorithm?" and it led to this short article / Q&A which states in question 2: Q2: What is the ...
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### How Brittle Are LCG-Cracking Techniques?

There are published techniques for cracking LCGs, but to my eye those techniques seem very brittle — very minor changes can add nonlinearity that renders techniques like the LLL algorithm unusable. ...
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### GPG/PGP Verification of Revocation

How does one verify a key revocation? After revoking a key and sending the revocation to MIT's keyserver, I noticed that the key is listed as such: ...
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### How strong is the ECDSA algorithm?

Some cryptographic algorithms are as strong as the size of their key is, while other have some weaknesses that limit their strength (such as SHA-1). How strong is the ECDSA algorithm, and does that ...
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### Is it possible to actually verify a “sponge function” security claim?

When using a “sponge function” to create a cryptographic hash, we can look at the flat sponge claim, which flattens the claimed success probabilities of all attacks using a single parameter: the ...
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### What is wrong with using SHA1 in digital signatures? Why is a robust hash function needed?

For the purposes of signing and verifying signatures, what is the value of the hash function? Why would it matter if SHA1 is later determined to be easy to break? Since a Public/Private key process ...
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### Are there cryptographic hash functions that can be computed using only paper and pen without leaking any information about the plaintext?

I am looking for a cryptographic hash function that can be computed by a human using only paper and pen without ever leaking any information about the plaintext on the paper. The cryptographic hash ...
7k views

### Compare Blockmode CBC (with diffuser) against XTS

I have some problems in understanding the "advantage" of AES-XTS compared to CBC with diffuser. I read something about FileVault, in this paper they mention the two modes of operations XTS and CBC (...
11k views

### AES in ECB mode weakness

In a project that I'm currently working on, we are encrypting some data using AES with ECB mode in a database. Each piece of data being encrypted is very small, no more than 10 characters long. Very ...
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### Why is Poly1305 popular given its 'sudden death' properties?

ECDSA has the undesirable property that if a key pair reuses a nonce in a signing operation, the cryptosystem experiences catastrophic failure in the form of private key leakage. I've heard this ...
8k views

### Simply put, what does “perfect secrecy” mean?

I would like to ask for a clear (but maybe not so deep) explanation of what the term "perfect secrecy" means. As far as I have researched and understood, it has to do with probabilities of assuming ...
442 views

### Security of pairing-based cryptography over binary fields regarding new attacks

In the last week, the discrete logarithm problem was broken for the binary fields $\mathbb{F}_{2^{(14 \times 127)}}$ and $\mathbb{F}_{2^{(27 \times 73)}}$. Pairing-based cryptography using binary ...
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### ElGamal: Multiplicative cyclic group and key generation

Here on the ElGamal wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElGamal_encryption Alice generates an efficient description of a multiplicative cyclic group G, of order q, with generator g. How ...
8k views

### How does a padding oracle attack work?

I am unsure of how a padding oracle attack works. What I am not getting is how changing one bit at one time allows one to exploit(get keys) ASP.NET machines. Can anyone explain this?
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### Why are bitwise rotations used in cryptography?

Any understanding I have of cryptography stops right around the cipher level. As such, I'm just curious as to why bit shifts and moreover circular bit shift are so prevalent in cryptography.
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### Is it okay to use a hash of a timestamp as the IV for AES?

The message format includes a datetime field in the clear. Is it okay to also use this field (or some hash thereof) as the initialization vector? In this case, CBC is the mode being used.
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### Multi-party encryption algorithm

To give some foreground information: I acknowledge that I am a cryptography newb and not by any means an expert (and probably never will be). In a recent CS class we had several assignments writing ...
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### What is a “rewinding argument”?

I've been reading a bit about cryptographic protocols and I keep seeing the phrase "rewinding argument". I've been unable to find a good source that would explain what is meant by this. It seems like ...
16k views

### Where i can find an AES implementation in python?

Where i can find a "reviewed" version of AES implementation in python. Not an API like PyCrypto whereby you can call AES algorithms in a single line.
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### Deterministically generate a RSA public/private key pair from a passphrase (with sufficient entropy)?

Is it possible to deterministically generate public/private RSA key pairs from passphrases? Would giving the (key generating) algorithm data made from key-stretching the passphrase (instead of a ...
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### Cryptographic Challenge: How to Say Something Confidentially to Snowden?

The Snowden situation raises an intereting cryptograpic problem. At present, how can something be sent confidentially to Snowden? Claim: I have no particular political orientation. The above ...
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### ECDSA vs ECIES vs ECDH

Recently I started studying Elliptic Curve Cryptography and I just loved it. I want to transfer some big data (like 3KB), What is the best method, ECDSA, ECIES, or ECDH (and why)? I am confused, how ...
7k views

### Is secp256r1 more secure than secp256k1?

Curves secp256r1 and secp256k1 are both examples of two elliptic curves used in various asymmetric cryptography. Googling for these shows most of the top results are Bitcoin related. I've heard the ...
2k views

### PBKDF2 for key diversification

I am looking for a secure key diversification function to create individual AES keys for a local smart card deployment. The keys need to be derived from a secret master key and the smart card serial ...
1k views

### Encryption scheme for social-network-like data sharing data via untrusted server?

I am thinking quite a lot lately abut the problem of secure, privacy-preserving social networking. Distributing the network among trusted, preferably self-hosted servers (like Diaspora, GNU Social etc....
3k views

### Encrypting small values with RSA private key

I'm looking for best practices when it comes to encrypting small (< 128 bytes) amounts of data with the RSA private key. Signing it would make the resulting payload too large.
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### How were shift amount constants in MD5 found?

The md5 specification gives a series of 4 rounds to execute over a 16-word block. Each round has a repeating sequence of 4 shift amounts (s in ...
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### Does collision resistance imply (or not) second-preimage resistance?

I've seen contradictory results. Sometimes hash functions are collision-resistant but not necessarily second-preimage resistant. I've seen this kind of things in papers from Bart Preneel: “Security ...
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### Automated security protocol verification tool for eCK model

I want a tool that (runs on Win7 and) can perform automated verification of a protocol in the eCK security model as described in Microsoft Research's paper "Stronger Security of Authenticated Key ...
476 views

### Why do we encrypt-then mac but sign-then-encrypt?

This question was asked in comments on my answer to should we sign then encrypt or encrypt then sign. I think posing the question as a separate entity is best, so: The general advice for applying ...
1k views

### How to authenticate over open channel?

I am making an arduino project to open my garage door. I want to make it so users with the passphrase can open the door. Due to computational restrictions it is unlikely encryption is possible. ...
3k views

I'm working on implementing a cryptographic system and I'm trying to understand the Zero Knowledge Password Proof concept. So here's some background: To generate a secret key I am: Doing an ECDH ...
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### CBC - a canonical mode, even though there are streaming modes

Why is CBC considered the canonical mode when there are streaming modes available such as CFB and OFB? One thing that I can think of is that in CBC you can easliy do range-based decryption. All you ...
4k views

### How to calculate an IV when I have a shared private key?

I'm working with a server/client system that has securely negotiated a private key. I need to encrypt/decrypt messages passing in both directions which are typically between 100 bytes to 100 KB. I'm ...
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### Hash decrypts key, key decrypts cipher… why?

I noticed recently that a couple of pieces of encryption software (TrueCrypt being one of them) don't directly use a hash of the password as the key for the block cipher. Instead, they generate a ...
23k views

### Does the SHA hash function always generate a fixed length hash?

I'm using the SHA1/2 family of algorithms for a particular project. I was wondering if all the SHA algorithms return a fixed length hash regardless of the length of the data.
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### Is pairing based cryptography ready for productive use?

I'm currently testing one among those many interesting cryptographic protocols based on bilinear maps. It's quite hard to understand the underlying fundamentals, especially since there are several ...
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### RSA Signature Weak Padding Attack

Assume that we have a message $m$ of size $n$, and it is padded with two 01 bytes in front. Then the signature $s$ is computed using a private key $ks$. Can we ...
2k views

### Any efficient text-based steganographic schemes?

While there are sophisticated and efficient steganographic schemes with images as cover available, I am yet ignorant of the existence of any fairly efficient and secure schemes with texts as cover. ...
333 views

### An electronic voting system

This semester I am taking the course Cryptography. I will have a presentation about the topic "Voting Scheme". I am preparing myself by reading from the book “Cryptography : an Introduction” by N....
3k views

### What is Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) and why is it “better”?

Most CS/Math undergrads run into the well-known RSA cryptosystem at some point. But about 10 years ago Boneh and Franklin introduced a practical Identity-Based Encryption system (IBE) that has ...
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### Real life systems that use concepts of crypto computing [closed]

Are there any working cloud/internet solutions/products that operates on encrypted data such as systems using homomorphic encryption, secure multiparty computation, electronic voting, private ...
6k views

### How does one implement the Inverse of AES' MixColumns

I got an answer in the related question about Mixcolumn for encryption, but how about decryption? what will I do? Because it said that I will used this: During decryption the Mix Column the ...
4k views

### Is MAC better than digital signature?

MACs differ from digital signatures in the sense that MAC values are both generated and verified using a shares secret key. Does this in any way put MAC on a disadvantage as compared to digital ...
1k views

### Proof for the SHA3 claim that 256 bit security is “post-quantum sufficient”?

On page 14 of "Keccak and the SHA-3 Standardization" (February 6, 2013) it says: Instantiation of a sponge function the permutation KECCAK-f 7 permutations: b → {25,50,100,200,400,800,...
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### Are there any known collisions for the SHA (1 & 2) family of hash functions?

Are there any known collisions for the hash functions SHA-1, SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512? By that, I mean are there known values of $a$ and $b$ where $F(a) = F(b)$ and $a ≠ b$?
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### What is the general justification for the hardness of finding preimages for cryptographic hash functions?

Since most cryptographic hash functions are simple, compact constructions does this simplicity impose a limit on the complexity and the size of a function that can generate preimages? That is, given a ...
### How robust is discrete logarithm in $GF(2^n)$?
"Normal" discrete logarithm based cryptosystems (DSA, Diffie-Hellman, ElGamal) work in the finite field of integers modulo a big prime $p$. However, there exist other finite fields out there, in ...