# All Questions

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### How does a key wrapping like RFC 3394 secure my cryptographic keys?

So I'm messing around in the BouncyCastle library with the RFC 3394 AES Key Wrap engine and I'm trying to understand the benefit of it. The problem I'm running into is how to store keys securely on a ...
78 views

### Partial hash code protocol for security tokens providing signatures

I've read the following two sentences within a beta protocol specification, which references ISO/IEC 7816-8 for PSO:HASH which already contains notions of a "partial hash". The off-card entity is ...
211 views

### How feasible is word-level frequency analysis over English (or any language)?

Say I have some black box which, given any English word, deterministically outputs a token for that word. Assume our black box is implemented using strong cryptography, i.e. the hardness of reversing ...
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### Using PBKDF2 twice with different argument order

I'm pretty sure this is a really bad approach (in theory), but one of my clients is doing this and I was wondering… How bad it is to perform pbkdf-2 in this way (with 2000 iterations)? ...
119 views

### Is there a flaw in this ECC blind signature scheme?

Recently I've found the following work on the internet: An ECC-Based Blind Signature Scheme The paper claims to be an ECDSA blind signature however it seems that their scheme has a flaw in it. The ...
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### Does $i^n=j^n$ for $i, j \in GF(2^q)$ and $i \neq j$ for some $n<2^q-1$

Let $i, j \in GF(2^q)$ and $i \neq j$ and $i,j\neq0$. Is that possible that $i^n=j^n$ for some $n$ such that $0 < n < 2^q-1$? I am looking for a proof if the answer is no, or for a method to ...
262 views

### Making my steganography code more hard to detect and crack

I'm doing a college project about digital image steganography on MATLAB. So far i've been able to get the help i needed from cool guys on stackoverflow but i now need to make my algorithm more hard to ...
736 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 ...
135 views

### How to attack this authentication protocol from “Cryptography: An introduction”

Consider the following protocol (from the book "Cryptography: An introduction", by Nigel Smart): ...
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### DES — Can I recover the key when I have both ciphertext and the plaintext?

Given a message and DES encrypted form of said message, is it possible to efficiently compute the key used to encrypt the data?
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397 views

### AES block cipher modes of operation

have a project in which I have to implement an en/de-cryption structure using a standard AES block of 128-bits in VHDL and I think I'm a bit confused. So I'd like to ask some questions about AES and ...
356 views

### Making counter (CTR) mode robust against application state loss

Counter (CTR) mode, which is a block cipher mode of operation, has some desirable qualities (no padding, parallel encryption and decryption), but at the cost of failing badly when non-unique counter ...
233 views

### Reordering non-block-aligned parts with DES in ECB mode

I was given a ciphertext file which was encrypted using DES in ECB mode. It is known that the plainttext that was encrypted has the following form: Each line of text consists of a payroll followed ...
269 views

### How to attack a fixed LCG with partial output?

To show some colleague programmers exactly how broken C's rand() is (at least on Windows) I decided to break it. So everyone knows the exact parameters, MSVC's ...
366 views

### Where is the S-Box generated in Rijandel/AES?

It's rather kind of lame questions, and I can't find good and clear explanation: In which step of Rijandel is S-box generated? Is the S-box reused in every round of cipher or is generated in every ...
579 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 ...
186 views

### Does impersonating an SRP server give you enough information for an off-line dictionary attack?

In a comment to an answer I wrote to another question, CodesInChaos wrote that: "Problem with SRP is that an attacker who impersonates a server learns the password hash, enabling offline search." ...
247 views

### Advantages of combined PRNGs

This question is related to this one in intention, and this one in scope. Would I be guarding myself against future attacks on a single PRNG if I combine two (or more) together? I am thinking of ...
188 views

### Quadratic residuosity problem reduction to integer factorization

How can one show how to reduce the quadratic residuosity problem to an integer factorization?
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### What is “Blinding” used for in cryptography?

What does "blinding" mean in cryptography, and where do we usually use it? Can you describe a sample implementation?
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### Probability that an attacker wins the discrete logarithm game when exponents are drawn from a subset

Suppose $g$ is a generator of an order $p$ cyclic group in which discrete logarithm is hard and $p$ is a prime (i.e., given $g^x$ for a random $x \in \{0,1,\ldots, p-1\}$, it is hard to recover $x$ ...
236 views

### RSA Without Padding?

I've been looking at the weakness with plain/textbook RSA, where the same message is encrypted and sent to multiple destinations. In this case, it is possible to recover the message. Given that an ...
266 views

### Two step encryption

Is there any asymmetric cryptography algorithm which will allow recursive encryption. ...
2k views

### Constructing RSA private key, given public key

As part of a puzzle I was given an RSA 256-bit public key and an encrypted message. The key itself is very weak, having exponent e = 65537 and modulus N = ...
1k views

### Cracking the Beaufort cipher

Is there any easy way to crack a Beaufort cipher? We have a Vigenère table, and are trying to guess the keyword. Any easier way?
451 views

### Key derivation from a random seed

The main problem is to use a block cipher to generate a random key. I would like to generate 256-bits key which can be as random as possible. I generate it in the following way: Pick a plaintext ...
146 views

### The meaning of “scheme”

This question is a bit different from other questions here, but I think it is suitable to correctly understand the terminology of cryptography. Consider the following two sets of terms: Encryption ...
168 views

### Encrypt array of int for individual retrieval

I have limited exposure to cryptographic terminology, so please bear with me. My end goal is to encrypt integer IDs, before transmitting them to a web client in a list of search results, in a way ...
321 views

### Is symmetric encryption vulnerable to plain-text-attacks?

Imagine that Bob sends a message to Alice for symmetric encryption to send to Charlie. (Only Alice and Charlie know the key.) Alice sends the encrypted message back to Bob to send to Charlie. Can Bob ...
524 views

### Advanced Encryption Standard Algorithm Secret Key

just a follow up question with this question.. How does the key schedule of Rijndael looks for keysizes other than 128 bit? A 256-bit key can still encrypt a block of plaintext in 128 bit? but in ...
342 views

### Blind signature with openssl

I'm trying to understand (to reproduce in practice) how does blinded tokens work. Currently i'm lacking examples. According to Wiki the blinded signature protocol is the same as ordinary signature ...
I'm trying to understand the precise requirements on padding when using RSA for encryption. Suppose Alice uses RSA to encrypt a payload $M$ that cannot be guessed (say, a random nonce): Alice send ...