# All Questions

308 views

### Toy encryption system that provides “hints”

I'm looking for a toy encryption system that has a specific property that when decrypting it with a key that is close enough to the key used in the encryption, it will produce some of the original ...
339 views

### Secret sharing scheme with possibility to change the secret

Here's a scenario I want to handle with a secret sharing scheme: Alice wants to share the secret $S$ with Bob, Charlie and Dave. Alice generates private shares based on $S$ for Bob, Charlie and ...
4k views

### Finding a keylength in a repeating key XOR cipher

In an old cryptography FAQ, I found the following step described for determining a the length of the key a cipher was repeatedly XORed against: Discover the length of the key by counting ...
448 views

### HMAC for short messages

I am using HMAC (hmac-sha256 to be precise) message authentication without encryption. My question is, is having a short message make it easy to determine what my secret key is? My C# code is as ...
408 views

### What do $0^n$ and $1^n$ mean in cryptography?

Let $f$ = $\{f_k\}$ be a pseudorandom function family. Let $G(x)$ be a pseudo-random generator such that: $G(x) = f_x(0^k)f_x(1^k)$ where $k=|x|$. I don't understand the meaning of $1^n$ ...
3k views

### Is RSASSA-PKCS1-v1_5 a good signature scheme for new systems?

Is RSASSA-PKCS1-v1_5 a good signature scheme to recommend that people use in new systems? Is it believed to be secure and represent the state-of-the-art in RSA-based signatures? I understand that ...
313 views

### md5: is reverse length-extension attack possible?

If I know H = md5( SECRET_KEY | DATA ) then I can calculate H' = md5( SECRET_KEY | DATA | DATA' ) That's length-extension ...
640 views

### Is there a standard for OpenSSL-interoperable AES encryption?

Many AES-encrypted things (files, strings, database entries, etc.) start with "Salted__" ("U2FsdGVkX1" in base64). I hear it's some sort of OpenSSL interoperability thing a b c. Is there some ...
2k views

### Why should the RSA private exponent have the same size as the modulus?

Consider the generation of an RSA key pair with a given modulus size $n$ and a known, small public exponent $e$ (typically $e = 3$ or $e = 65537$). A common method is to generate two random primes ...
770 views

256 views

### Cryptographic data structure: sparse array without membership test

I would like a data structure supporting two operations: $\mathsf{set}(k,v)$ and $\mathsf{get}(k)$, with the following properties: $k$ can be any number between $0$ and something impressively large, ...
153 views

### GCM: Math behind update of AAD after ciphertext has been processed

In the Bouncy Castle libraries, the GCM cipher implementation has an interesting property that does not seem described in the GCM papers (neither the NIST or the original paper): Some AAD was sent ...
212 views

### Encryption-Decryption-Encryption

I have learned from Applied Cryptography that triple encryption with three independent keys in encryption-decryption-encryption (EDE) process gives security not higher then $2^{2n}$ when it comes to ...
391 views

### For a one-time pad, which MAC method is information-theoretically secure?

In the the main post about MAC methods it mentions a few methods: Authenticate And Encrypt: The sender computes a MAC of the plaintext, encrypts the plaintext, and then appends the MAC to the ...
399 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 ...
447 views

### Perfect Forward Secrecy with Pre-shared Key

I've recently been looking at how to do perfect forward secrecy on a unidirectional connection (server can only push messages to client, client cannot respond). What I've come up with is the idea of ...
708 views

### How do institutions like banks do RSA with big primes?

When encrypting with RSA it is often infeasible to decrypt by just doing c^d mod n, because for example when using the primes $(p,q)=(12553,1233)$, which are small ...
419 views

### Computing IV for CBC from PBKDF2 + HKDF

Note that this question is somewhat similar to Can I use my random IV (for AES) as a salt for PBKDF2? My current encryption format computes two random PBKDF2 salts (encryption and HMAC, 8 bytes each) ...
236 views

### Do test vectors ensure a cipher is free of backdoors?

If a cipher implementation passes unit tests using test vectors from some trusted source (these for AES, for example), then can we say that it is fully conforming to the specification, and must have ...
187 views

### Keyed digest function with odds of collision below the birthday bound?

I wonder if it is possible to devise a function $F(K,S,R_S)\mapsto D$ where: $K$ is some key (I have freedom on $K$, it could even be generated by a trusted party); $S$ is in $\{0,1\}^s$, say ...
242 views

### How to Distribute the Shares using Secret Sharing for arbitrary Monotone Access Structures

Consider 4 people, $A$,$B$,$C$,$D$, & a secret $s\in\{0,1\}^k$. Construct a scheme which enables the following subsets of people to retrieve the secret $\{A,B\}$, $\{A,C\}$, $\{B,C,D\}$. I know ...
175 views

### Can I use the ChaCha core as a 256-bit to 256-bit one-way function?

I'm looking to implement Lamport signatures as a little fun project, and I need a fast one way function that maps $\{0,1\}^{256} \rightarrow \{0,1\}^{256}$. I was wondering whether I could safely use ...
408 views

### What is the difference between a 'cipher' and a 'mode of operation'?

What is the difference between the term cipher (a name like RIJNDAEL) and mode of operation (like ECB)? Aren't these both terms for the encryption/decryption technique?
681 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 ...
301 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 ...
161 views

### Does EAX use the same keys for encryption and authentication?

I am actually checking use of EAX AEAD mode, and following EAX spec review (scheme definition for my part), my question is: what about the derivation of the authentication and encryption keys? In the ...
388 views

### Why are elliptic curves better than cyclic groups?

The set of points of an elliptic curve over a finite field is isomorphic to the direct product of two cyclic groups (i.e. $E(F_{p^n}) \cong Z_{s} \times Z_{t})$. What is the advantage of representing ...
270 views

### How hard is it to generate a partial RSA fingerprint collision?

When I use SSH to log into a new system, I get asked to verify that the fingerprint (a 32 hex digits string) of the hosts's RSA key is correct. How much if it must I actually compare (by hand/eye) to ...
138 views

### low-exponent RSA

I have questions from http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F3-540-68339-9_1 Suppose we have 2 messages $m_1$ and $m_2$ related by a known relation $m_2=m_1+1$. Suppose further the messages are ...
589 views

### Hill-cipher, disordered alphabet

I am going to apply a simple substitution cipher to my input, then encrypt the result with a Hill cipher. How can this be broken, in a chosen-plaintext threat model? In other words, instead of the ...
2k views

### Would a “Triple AES” (in the sense of how Triple Des works) serve for a dramatic increase in safety?

The system requires to be as paranoid as possible regarding security. One of the few contemplated changes to the current design is to use multiple encryption. First proposal was to use Serpent on top ...
591 views

### Diffie-Hellman key agreement with both Server Authentication and Perfect Forward Secrecy

I am trying to find the protocol with the least overhead, which still meets the following requirements: Server Authentication of server identity to client. The client has an authentic copy of the ...
389 views

### Can I combine two PRNGs to make use of more seed data?

I have 320 bits of seed data (actually 512 bits of data with 320 bits of entropy, derived from a Diffie-Hellman shared secret and nonces). The PRNG I am using at the moment is the android version of ...
778 views

### 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?
272 views

### A situation where security by obscurity might be the best solution - or am I wrong?

Imagine the following situation. There is an application for a microcontroller-driven system. The profits are made from manufacturing and selling the device itself. However, it is expected, that the ...
3k 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 = ...
639 views

### Can I use my random IV (for AES) as a salt for PBKDF2?

Also, where do I store my salt (can I just store it at the beginning of the encrypted file)?
723 views

### Is this a correctly formatted PGP session key packet?

RFC 4880 may be full of information, but it can be incredibly vague at times, so im looking for someone who actually knows the answer to this. Given this public key: ...
425 views

### Using a derived key for CMAC

Consider the following authenticate-and-encrypt scheme that uses AES-128 in CBC mode for encryption and AES-128 - based CMAC for authentication: Two keys are derived from the master key k (16 byte): ...
196 views

### Addition step in MD5 implementation

In MD5, there are four rounds. After every round, why do we need to add the computed $Q$ values to the initial values and then take this value as input to the next round. For example after the first ...