All Questions

3k views

Generating Random Primes

Although this has been extensively discussed around here, I'm curious whether my approach makes sense, or I should just stick to "the standard version". I'm implementing some homomorphic encryption ...
906 views

How secure is the AES master key if Round Keys are found

If an attacker finds some round key of AES256, is it possible to find the master key? How safe is the master key if an attackers finds multiple round keys?
1k views

Why is AES considered to be secure?

The security of RSA is based on the integer factorization problem, which is a very well defined and understood mathematical problem. This problem must be solved in order to fundamentally break RSA. ...
1k views

Is ISAAC considered secure as a cryptographic random number generator?

The ISAAC site claims it is secure, but I wasn't aware of any trusted 3rd party sources that verified its security.
5k views

Why is AES not a Feistel cipher?

I am studying for an exam right now. And I wanted to make sure I got this point correct. AES is not a Feistel cipher because the operations in AES are not invertible. Is the above statement correct?...
1k views

Is FIPS 140-2's “Continuous random number generator test” practical?

Section 4.9.2 of FIPS PUB 140-2 specifies, amongst other things, a "Continuous random number generator test." Here are the relavant bits: If each call to a[n] RNG produces blocks of n bits (...
533 views

What is the key strength reduction encrypting only 160 bits of data using RSA1024 for signatures?

I am attempting to determine the strength of an incorrectly implemented 1024 bit RSA signature scheme. The weakness in the implementation is that the padding data lacks random numbers. As a result, ...
14k views

Calculating private keys in the RSA cryptosystem

The number $43733$ was chosen as base for an implementation of the RSA system. $M=19985$ is the message, that was encrypted with help of a public key $K=53$. What is the plaintext text? What is the ...
813 views

HMAC vs ECDSA for JWT

I will be implementing JSON web tokens into my website and have a question about implementing them. I have a choice of using two algorithms, HMAC-SHA256 and ECDSA-SHA256. I have used HMAC-SHA256 in ...
855 views

Does using modulo (%) affect quality of randomness?

I'm writing a small script that generates random non-signed decimal integers within a certain range of values. I'm using GNU od, with the following command: ...
261 views

Is HMAC-SHA-1 secure?

Although SHA-1 theoretically has collisions, HMAC-SHA-1 which is based on SHA-1 is still widely used (in TLS for example) and is considered to be secure. How is that possible?
115 views

Which attacks are possible against raw/textbook NTRU encryption?

In the same fashion that these questions about attacks to textbook RSA and ECC, I was wondering what are the immediate drawbacks of applying NTRU Encryption directly, without any padding scheme, such ...
345 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 ...
792 views

Keccak padding implementation, and bit ordering

I am trying to implement Keccak in Java for my school work. And I am getting stuck in two places: On the summary page the padding is shown as P = M || 0x01 || 0x00 || … || 0x00 P = P xor (...
662 views

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, ...
170 views

Advantages of making streamcipher stream depend on plaintext?

Most descriptions that explain how streamciphers work (like the one on Wikipedia), tend to describe a model that boils down to a simple “$ciphertext = plaintext \oplus stream$”, where the stream is ...
208 views

Hamiltonicity proof of knowledge

I'm learning the POK notion and definitions and as a self exercise I wante to prove the statement that the Hamiltonicity protocol is a POK system with knowledge error $1/2$. So the question will be ...
123 views

What are the computational benefits of primes close to the power of 2?

Recently I was reading some article about the Bernstein's Curve25519. This is a particular Montgomery curve over $\mathbb{F}_q$ where $q = {2^{255}-19}$. What I missed or was unable to understand is ...
447 views

Single Party Encryption, Multi Party Decryption

I am looking for an adequate protocol for public key decryption, which would allow $n$ parties to jointly decrypt a cipher text. The usage scenario for such a protocol would be a mixnet that wouldn't ...
202 views

Authenticating data generated by a particular build of an open source program

[I was torn between posting here or security.stackexchange.com. In the end, I felt that this was more of a design question, rather than an implementation question and so chose this forum.] My ...
552 views

Deterministically combine more than one source of entropy

What is the proper/canonical way to do this? For example, $0 < r1 < 1$ and $0 < r2 < 1$. Presuming uniformly distributed probabilities for the two, combining/averaging them is going to ...
558 views

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 ...
447 views

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 ...
130 views

$(k, n)$ threshold secret sharing to $(k+k', n + n')$ without reissuing all shares

Given a $(k,n)$ threshold secret sharing used to back up a secret (meaning that the dealer has access to the secret at all times), is it possible to update it to a $(k+k', n+n')$ threshold secret ...
128 views

Verifying Diffie–Hellman parameters someone else generated

I am auditing some software that includes compiled in Diffie–Hellman parameters (2048 bits). I can't be sure who generated the DH parameters or how they were generated. Question: Can DH ...
492 views

Slow one-way pseudo-random permutation?

I'm looking for a slow one-way pseudo-random permutation; or in other words a block cipher $E_K: P\in\{0,1\}^b\mapsto C\in\{0,1\}^b$ with moderate block size $b\approx 64$ bits, wide key $K$, ...
281 views

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 well....
551 views

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?
461 views

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 ...
2k views

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 ...
194 views

Generating non-repeating N-bit IVs, which are indistinguishable from randomness

I'm implementing a protocol which needs a 64-bit IV for every encrypted packet. The cipher in use (AES-GCM, more or less as specified in RFC 4106) does not require that these IVs are random, only ...
295 views

How to communicate authentication tag for GCM?

I have written some code to do AES in GCM. I currently manually append the tag property to the ciphertext, is this the proper way to communicate the authentication tag?
696 views

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 ...
2k 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 ...
2k views

ZIP 2.0 encryption bruteforce attack

I have an old sourcecode backup from my DOS days stored in a ZIP 2.0 encrypted archive, but I lost the password. The password was written on a paper slip, but I remember that it consisted of 30+ ...
318 views

1k views

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 ...
122 views

Which attacks are possible against raw/textbook elliptic curve?

A quick question, we know that raw RSA is a no go. To solve this we have different PKCS standards forcing structure on the input messages. For EC the story is something else. For signatures we have ...