# All Questions

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### How can I remove my personal data from my PGP public key?

According to this Q&A-discussion it is possible to remove all personal data (name and mail address) that is attached to a public key. What steps do I have to follow in order to remove all ...
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### Is there a hash function which has no collisions?

Is there a hash function which has no collisions? To clarify: it would be some function which would produce variable-length output, and never produce the same output for differing input. It would ...
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### What is the difference between MAC and HMAC?

In reference to this question, what are the "stronger security properties" that HMAC provides over MAC. I got that MAC requires an IV whereas HMAC doesn't. I also understood that MAC may reveal ...
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### How can an S-Box be reversed?

So, as an exercise to greater understand some things about cryptography, I decided to try and implement GOST 28147-89, which uses eight 4x4 S-Boxes. I can grasp the concept of putting 4 bits through ...
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### Why doesn't CTR mode require blocking?

I've been reading a bit about block cipher modes and I have a relatively straightforward question regarding CTR. In essence, I was hoping you guys would be kind enough to validate my understanding of ...
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### Finding where I am in a linear recurrence relation

Suppose I have a linear recurrence relation $$a(n) = c_1 a(n-1) + \dots + c_k a(n-k) + d,$$ where the constants $c_1,\dots,c_k,d$ are given and the initial values $a(0),\dots,a(k-1)$ are given as ...
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### Does TLS use RC4-drop[n]?

According to many sources, the first few (n) bytes of the RC4 keystream are strongly biased, and therefore should be discarded before using the keystream to encrypt anything; this precaution is ...
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### Security equivalence proofs for breaking RSA

It is my understanding that while a practical solution to the factoring problem will definitely break RSA, it has never been proven that the security of RSA is equivalent to factoring. In otherwords, ...
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### Is there some way to generate a non-predictable random number in a decentralised network?

Is there a way to generate a random number with given restrictions: It will be used in a decentralised network with a big number of peers (no central authority to generate it) Its generation should ...
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### Threshold Signatures for RSA and DSA

I have a few questions relating to threshold signatures: a scheme where $n$ participants hold a key share and any $t$ of them can conduct a protocol using their shares that results in a valid RSA or ...
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### Where could I submit my algorithm?

I have come up with an encryption algorithm and I am looking for a place to possibly publish it. Any ideas?
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### What are the constraints for an IV using AES in CBC mode?

I'm designing a protocol for use into a VPN software. The VPN frames are encapsulated into AES-256 CBC encrypted frames. I understand that IVs must be uniquely used for each message encrypted with ...
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### Should the secret key of Shamir's secret-sharing algorithm be interpreted byte by byte?

Should the secret message of Shamir's secret-sharing algorithm be interpreted and processed byte by byte? Interpreting it byte by byte makes it easier to process, but in case one of the shareholders ...
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### Is SHA-1 still practical secure under specific scenarios?

It is conjectured that SHA-1 has been broken from the "research" perspective but no in real world. That is that there is an algebraic attack that explores weaknesses on its algrebraic construction. ...
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### How to generate a key using any m passwords out of total n?

My application requires an AES-256 key K for some secure operation. In order to avoid saving this key in application, I have implemented following scheme: There ...
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### Security for IV in AES-GCM mode

I'd like to use AES-GCM instead of HMAC for authentication and privacy in a token used in a web application, but I'm unsure how to securely tag each token with an IV. Is it safe for me to prepend the ...
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### Is a book cipher provably secure?

I've seen ciphers (usually in spy drama shows) that involve taking a book and writing down an index to individual characters. Essentially it's a keyed substitution cipher, where the key is the name ...
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### Example of CHI Square test on Caesar Cipher?

I am trying to get my head round the chi square test, when used with the Caesar cipher. I started off using this formula, $$X = \sum_{i = 1}^k \frac{f_i · f'_i}{n · n'}$$ Where ...
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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 ...
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### How to calculate the time it'll take to crack RSA or DH?

Sometimes the easiest way to describe security of a type of cryptography is to say that "the time it takes to solve for an x-bit key would be y years". How would one go about doing such a calculation ...
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### 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 ...
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### Length-preserving all-or-nothing transform

Is there any known way to construct a length-preserving all-or-nothing transform? In other words, a secure all-or-nothing transform where the length of the output is the same as the length of the ...
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### 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 ...
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### Can a commutative block cipher be indistinguishable from a random one, assuming a random permutation of keyspace?

Define a commutative block cipher with keyspace the finite set $K$, and message space the finite set $S$, to be an application \begin{align} E:K\times S&\mapsto S\\ (k,x)&\mapsto ...
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I want to encrypt data and protect its integrity and confidentiality. However, I cannot increase the length of the data. Are there any cipher modes of operation which provide confidentiality and ...
314 views

### Block Ciphers and (Non-)Generic Attacks

I am currently reading through Cryptography Engineering and came across this definition of block cipher security: Definition 2 An attack on a block cipher is a non-generic method of ...
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### How can k3d3/ed25519-java's performance be improved?

I tried asking this on stackoverflow because I thought it might be a simple coding question and didn't want to clutter up this amazing stack, but I received no responses. CodesInChaos showed me that ...
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### Can an RSA public key be generated without ever knowing the factors? [duplicate]

Context: http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/12/a-few-more-notes-on-nsa-random-number.html Assume I wanted to use RSA as the basis for a hash function or DRBG. Also assume that my construct ...
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### What are the advantages of CBC over ECB?

From this question I understand that, for a block cipher, using CBC is better than ECB. It seems that if one only has part of the cipher text, then decryption is difficult because the decryption ...
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### Unforgeability and type of adversary

When trying to prove security of asymmetric signature, for instance for existential (or strong) unforgeability against chosen messages attack, do we need to consider the signer as a possible ...
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### Why use a timestamp and how can someone know it's the correct one?

Let's say A wants to send a message, so everyone who gets the message, can be assured that it's from A. A then sends a message ...
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### Can anyone give an example where (asymmetric) crypto can go wrong due to selection of wrong groups?

Basically the title says it all. It would be great if someone could tell give an example using provable security. More information about groups can be found at: ...
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### Why $n=pq$ with $p=2p'+1$ and $q=2q'+1$ instead of just $n=p'q'$ for RSA crypto?

For RSA cryptography, we know that the modulo $n$ is a product of two big prime numbers(say $p$ and $q$). However, in some documents I see an extension of $p=2p'+1$ and $q=2q'+1$ with $q'$ and $p'$ ...
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### Non-interactive proof that an element is in a subgroup

I am just reading the DAA paper (http://eprint.iacr.org/2004/205.pdf, Appendix A). A party $\mathcal{I}$ generates two group elements $g' \in \mathrm{QR}_n$ and $h = g'^r \bmod n$ with \$r \in_R \left| ...
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### Can S/MIME be still considered secure?

Previoulsy I had asked this question at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18235983/can-s-mime-be-still-considered-secure but I feel this forum is topic-wise the right place. Recently there has been ...
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### Is my identity exposed when publishing my public key or encrypting with PGP?

Let's say I create my PGP keys with my appropriate name and email address. Will these personal information be exposed if I publish my public key? When I encrypt a message for sending it to my ...
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### CTR mode nonce with aggressive key rotation policy

I'm writing a small encryption library which will be required to use the shortest possible amount of overhead for describing ciphertexts. I want to use CTR mode with a 6-byte random nonce. Normally ...
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### Why is asymmetric encryption IND-CPA?

According to Wikipedia, the IND-CPA game is: The challenger generates a key pair PK, SK based on some security parameter k (e.g., a key size in bits), and publishes PK to the adversary. The ...
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### Compare two hashes with different salt

I'm storing the salted hash of a credit card number in a database. What I'd like to be able to do is determine if two different entries in the same database correspond to the same credit card. ...