# All Questions

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### Can stream ciphers (usually) be “run backwards”?

Is it possible to reconstruct the previous output bits of a stream cipher, e.g. RC4, when only the current state is known, or is that computationally hard, or even impossible (due to ambiguous ...
791 views

### Is there an encryption/decryption algorithm that can give two different outputs?

The recent revelations that airport staff can detain travellers in an interrogation room and force them to give over passwords to encrypted-HDD laptops under threat of jail time has made me think ...
248 views

### Can GCM be used in incremental mode?

I want to sync blobs over the network and the most frequent change will be appending to blob. To minimize data amount sent I would prefer to encrypt appended data, send it over the network, append to ...
743 views

### Will rehashing an SHA256 hash continually, eventually produce every possible value?

So let's say you had infinite time and energy. You have a hashed string of some sort. Because you have infinite time and energy, you can produce a collision(or the original value) easily enough. But, ...
160 views

### One-way function and $EXP$

All examples of one-way functions I have see till now are closely related to the assumption that $NP\neq P$ (or even weaker ones, such as $UP\neq P$), but why not considering the theorem $P\neq EXP$? ...
2k views

### RSA PCKS1 v2.1 RSAES-OAEP algorithm

Using RSA public key (n,e) the encryption of a message is c= (m^e) mod n and the corresponding message is decrypted as ...
6k views

### Are there hash algorithms with variable length output?

I understand that for example MD5 produces a 128 bit hash value from a given text of variable size. My question is if there is a hash-like algorithm that will produce a hash value where one can ...
281 views

### Encryption schemes and pseudorandom permutations

Can an encryption scheme (deterministic or not) be viewed as a pseudorandom permutation taking as input a message and returning a value of the same bit-encoding length ? Thank you.
357 views

### PBKDF2 uses HMAC-SHA1 to generate keys, but what is the key for the HMAC?

I was reading up on PBKDF2 and noted the following: DK = PBKDF2(PRF, Password, Salt, c, dkLen) PRF is a keyed HMAC, but I can't seem to find out what they use ...
2k views

### Using one-way hash functions as the encryption method

Suppose two parties want to communicate securely with each other (Bob and Alice) using a simple messaging system in English. There are approximately 180,000 currently used words in the English ...
961 views

### Self-expiring symmetric keys, or: cryptography in absence of secure deletion

I can encrypt some data D using a random symmetric key K, obtaining a ciphertext C, and then encrypt K with my public key Pub and obtain H. So far so good: I can only decrypt C if I have H and my ...
474 views

### Why the symmetric key layer in PGP?

I've been familiarizing myself with the basics of PGP. If I understand correctly, PGP symmetrically encrypts the data of interest using a random single-use key, then encrypts the encrypted data and ...
211 views

### Any problems with this secure time synchronization scheme?

I have a time authority and I want to securely set a client's time to this authority's time/date within a precision of $\delta$ seconds. The authority's public key is known to the client. This was my ...
1k views

### What is the progress on the MIT LCS35 Time Capsule Crypto-Puzzle?

Ron Rivest posed a puzzle in 1999. MIT LCS35 Time Capsule Crypto-Puzzle. The problem is to compute $2^{2^t} \pmod n$ for specified values of $t$ and $n$. Here $n$ is the product of two large ...
496 views

### How terribly flawed is this design for key storage?

Dave here, with a plan for storing secrets. Threat model: Database and keyfile may (will?) be stored on un-trusted servers. Database contains many valuable secrets (passwords), encrypted by key ...
152 views

### Feedback requested on a method of posting a message without revealing the author

So I was thinking about variations on the Dining Cryptographers problem - In some cases, it's useful to be able to post a message without revealing the source, but with the additional constraint of ...
232 views

### Is it possible to translate a piece of language into your own without knowing the language? [closed]

I understand the the texts within the Voynich Manuscript are of an unknown language, and yet cryptographers are still working on it and still trying to decipher it. Does that mean that it is possible ...
3k views

### Initialization vector in symmetric-key encryption

Can we use symmetric-key algorithms without an initialization vector? I am making an app where both the sender and receiver share a key and there is no way to create an initialization vector for each ...
106 views

### ASN.1 OID of bcrypt

What is the ASN.1 OID associated to bcrypt (the key derivation scheme)? For instance, PBKDF2 has 1.2.840.113549.1.5.12 and it is therefore possible to store a ...
124 views

### Where can I double check my elliptic curve results?

I am trying to do some elliptic curve calculations by hand, just to refresh myself on how the system works. I calculated some points and did some operations by hand. I am trying to double check my ...
275 views

### How to renew keys for a statically-encrypted database

Preamble Before I ask this question, please accept that I fully understand that 'rolling your own' is never a good idea, and that I am a relative n00b. The only reason I am doing this the way I am is ...
1k views

### Storing Credentials for a Third Party

(Originally posted to SOF, but I got no answers) I am designing a small application for use inside my company. My application needs to connect to a third party website on behalf of my application ...
169 views

### Create a field in PBC

Edited (I removed the emphasize on Integers): My question is partly cryptography and partly programming, I would appreciate any help on any aspect of it :) I want to use PBC library to do the ...
484 views

### What is the relation between hash chaining and chosen prefix attack

I read that hash chaining can be used to prevent hash collisions, while the chosen prefix attack allows hash collisions for algorithms like MD5. How are they related? Does hash chaining prevent the ...
734 views

### RSA smaller number work-out-by-hand not working - I think I made a mistake

I tried out the paper/pencil explanation @ http://sergematovic.tripod.com/rsa1.html, and it seemed to make sense just fine until I came to decryption. Here is what I worked out: Key Creation: Choose ...
756 views

### Why restricting SHA3 to have only two possible capacities?

I just read the presentation slides of John M. Kesley (from NIST) for his invited talk at CHES 2013 about SHA-3 and learned that NIST is going to standardize Keccak with a possibly modified padding ...
320 views

### How can I take advantage of repeated patterns in non random RSA prime factors?

I am researching vulnerable RSA moduli which are composed of primes generated with poor entropy. Having a list of these primes I searched for variable sized repeated patterns among them and I noticed ...
1k views

### Why is the complexity of RSA-1024 80 bit and not 86 bit?

Why is the complexity of RSA-1024 80 bit and not 86.76611925028119 bit? Here is the complexity for the GNFS (pulled from the linked Wikipedia article): \exp\left( ...
236 views

### PKCS#11: Can C_GetMechanismInfo() return CKR_OK on a disabled mechanism?

According to PKCS#11 v2.20, "C_GetMechanismInfo obtains information about a particular mechanism possibly supported by a token." Does that mean ...
344 views

### Proof of correctness of a homomorphic ElGamal sum

Let's suppose we are using the exponential ElGamal as a public-key encryption scheme, so that we encrypt $g^m$ instead of $m$, for some generator $g$. Let $x$ be the private key, and $h=g^x$ be the ...
501 views

### RSA Attack with some known values

There is an RSA implementation which I need to attack to get the encrypted messages. Some of the values are known. Plain text value for input. So if I enter a message, say it "A", the plain text is ...
196 views

### RC4 system pitfalls

A system fell into my neck, where lots of files are splitted into several segments and encoded via RC4. RC4, because client side - slow computer, slow flash arithmetic ops - can only decode big blobs ...
1k views

### How to hash a list of multiple items?

In some protocols, a key is derived from a hash of many parameters (K=H(param1,param2,param3)) Is there a hash function that takes many parameters as input ? Or we can simply use a function like ...
425 views

### Do ciphertexts leak information about their algorithmic creators?

If an adversary holds thousands of encrypted files that were encrypted with the same cipher, can he determine which cipher method had been used on the files? Assume that the adversary has no prior ...
205 views

### Proof of work for determining whether a number is prime?

I have an idea for a system that would be outsourcing some brute force calculations to many users in hopes of finding divisors of a number. However, there is a possibility that a given number would be ...
459 views

### Hamming Distance vs. Index of Coincidence

When analyzing a repeating-key xor cipher to find the key length, I've read about two key methods (assuming there aren't just repeating chunks of ciphertext for Kasiski's method), for some assumed key ...
296 views

### Multiple iterations of AES for key derivation?

The keepass password manager uses multiple rounds of AES for its key derivation, as described here. I was somewhat surprised that it wasn't using pbkdf2, bcrypt, or something more common. ...
2k views

### HMAC-SHA1 input size

I know that the HMAC is a message authentication code that uses a cryptographic key in conjunction with a hash function (SHA1 , MD5, etc.). The HMAC output is 160 bits for HMAC-SHA160 and 256 bits for ...
519 views

### Finite fields and ECC

I understand modular arithmetic(or at least I think I do!) and I've tried to read and learn about how the Math in RSA works(and I think it went pretty well). I've been reading up on ECC and it looks ...
763 views

### Should I delete cryptographic data from memory?

When dealing with cryptographic data, is there a chance that attacker recovers portion of data I used in my program? Should I try to delete every bit of keys and encrypted data that I used, overwrite ...
129 views

### Authentication protocols for authenticating devices to a server

The requirement is to authenticate 1000s of devices to a server when the devices try to contact the server. The problem I face is that all authentication protocols require some kind of shared secret ...
40 views

### How does a cracker know if they've broken AES-CBC encryption? [duplicate]

How does a cracker know if they've broken CBC or stream encryption? With hashe cracking one would know because you have the password that you started with to test. But for CBC decryption, you have a ...
380 views

### Why no swapping block in the last round of DES?

Round 16 on the encryption side, and round 16 on the decryption side of DES have no swapping module. Why is it like this? Can anyone provide any justification? This is my homework question.
2k views

### Is AES-XTS considered safe to encrypt multiple files with the same keys?

I was wondering if changing the cipher mode to AES-XTS in EncFS would be a sound idea. EncFS uses AES in CBC mode until the last 1KB block, and CFB mode for the last block if ...
991 views

### Lagrange Interpolation for finite field GF(2^8), for Secret Reconstruction

I'm using Lagrange's Interpolation technique to reconstruct the secret from a set of point pairs (x,y). Since I only need the secret, not the whole polynomial, I have simplified the reconstruction ...
1k views

### KDF and number of iterations for GPG

I gather, from reading the GPG manual, that symmetric encryption based on a password uses one of a variety of Key Derivation Functions (KDF). Although not explicitly mentioned I assume that PBKDF2 is ...
401 views

### Elliptic curve parameter generation

I am curious of the details of how one would go about generating elliptic curve parameters. (I know standardized parameters exist, but I'm trying to understand both how they were generated and the ...
302 views

### Quantum resistance of Lamport signatures

The Lamport-Diffie signature scheme is said to be quantum-resistant. Why is that? What would a quantum attempt to attack this signature scheme look like, and how does it fail?