# All Questions

3k views

### Replay attack in ECB mode

How do replay attacks work in ECB mode? I found this in Wikipedia: "ECB mode can also make protocols without integrity protection even more susceptible to replay attacks, since each block gets ...
4k views

### How large should a Diffie-Hellman p be?

In a Diffie-Hellman exchange, the parties need to agree on a prime p and a base g in order to continue. Assuming some ...
1k views

### RS Erasure Coding and Shamir's Secret Sharing

So I was trying to understand the basic difference between erasure coding and secret sharing, and I found this paper (that you can find here or here). For what I understand, it states that Shamir's ...
5k views

### Encrypted text length in AES

I have created an application that will be able to read any file and encrypt it using AES Encryption. For efficiency, I am reading a block of data, encrypting it and so on. So for decrypting, I just ...
85 views

### Do we have anyway of knowing if avoiding self-permutation in RC4 makes it any stronger?

OK, so lots of questions get asked about RC4 but I want to make mine specific and hopefully answerable. RC4 Design as I'm sure anyone reading this knows, uses self permutation in stage 1 of the KSA. ...
76 views

### Is it okay to use an HMAC of the plaintext and a (possibly distinct) key as the IV for symmetric cryptography?

I was thinking of how to create an IV for a block cipher that doesn't require stored state, and I came up with the idea of using an HMAC of the (padded) plaintext and a (possibly distinct) key as the ...
669 views

### Would it be better to split a file and then encrypt, or vice versa?

Assuming that you're paranoid before storing your file (distributed across a shared location), which will be the best case scenario: splitting the file first and then encrypting or encrypting first ...
283 views

### Is ChaCha20 alone sufficient for securing data-at-rest?

I wonder if ChaCha20 alone is sufficient for securing files stored on a disk or should Poly1305 should be used along with it? AFAIK, Poly1305 is used to secure the authentication channel, but for ...
753 views

### AES decryption vs encryption speed

Let's consider the CTR mode. For a faster encryption/decryption, is it preferable to use the decryption operation of AES, or its encryption ?
341 views

### Is Curve25519 vulnerable to private key exposure in the case of a bad RNG?

I'm really excited by what I've learned of advancements in elliptic-curve cryptography. Curve25519 seems to be a great choice at this point in time, but if I recall correctly, some elliptic curve ...
155 views

### Can Alice send Bob a secure message with only DSA and no key exchange?

Suppose Bob has a DSA key pair, and Alice has Bob's public key. Is there any secure way that Alice can send Bob a message only he can read if Bob can not send any reply? I think the answer is no, ...
255 views

### Is standardizing a modified AES a good idea?

"Recently" the Ukraine standardized a new block cipher Kalyna, which according to the abstract of"A New Encryption Standard of Ukraine: The Kalyna Block Cipher" by Oliynykov et al. (warning: the paper ...
386 views

### The difference between MAC algorithms and what to use

I've been looking into message authentication codes and found several ways to create integrity for a message. I know of the following algorithms: HMAC, this can use any cryptograhpic hash function ...
271 views

### Finding strong primes

Wikipedia lists the following conditions for a prime to be strong: $p-1$ has large prime factors. That is, $p = a_1 q_1 + 1$ for some integer $a_1$ and large prime $q_1$. $q_1-1$ has large prime ...
345 views

Are there any "good" ways to get a permutation from a password/pass-phrase? If one, for example, wanted to get a permutation of letters from a password, how might one do that in a smart way? I would ...
520 views

### Is there a technique to confirm that a given large integer value is a product of two primes?

Given a list of 2048 bit integer values in which one or few 2048 bit integer values may be product of two prime numbers and other values may be just 2048 bit odd integers numbers. My question is - ...
1k views

### Are the SHA family hash outputs practically random?

Say I hashed the output from a random number generator (with nonce), would the resulting SHA256 hash be as random as the inputted number? And If I used the first 5 hex characters, and then used the ...
309 views

### Can two people with different one time pads securely exchange a message like this?

Alice has a message, generates a one time pad, encrypts her message and sends it to Bob. Bob generates his own one time pad, encrypts the message again, and sends it back to Alice. Alice then decrypts ...
768 views

### Security proofs for CBC mode

I'm looking for different approaches to proofs for the security of CBC mode encryption. What are the best sources of information about this subject?
471 views

### Can we design a public-key infrastructure without certificate authorities?

In a recent essay, Bruce Schneier tasks the engineering community with redesigning and rebuilding the vulnerable parts of the Internet's backbone. We need to figure out how to re-engineer the ...
399 views

### What criteria make the theta step of Keccak's round function reversible?

From what I've been reading, Keccak's round function is reversible. That's pretty obvious for the $\rho$, $\pi$ and $\iota$ transforms. For $\chi$ to be reversible, $x$'s range has to be odd — but ...
284 views

### Why is it said that if we have a duplicate ciphertext block it can leak our information?

I have been recently going through a question: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/15767/what-do-key-size-and-block-size-mean-in-cryptography and it created in me a series of doubts. Referring ...
2k views

### True random numbers generated by sensors

Is using sensor raw data a good way of generating true random numbers? I mean using an IPhone's gyro/accelerometer raw output as a base for generating an array of true random numbers.
2k views

### Can Elgamal be made additively homomorphic and how could it be used for E-voting?

Elgamal is a cryptosystem that is homomorphic over multiplication. How can I convert it to an additive homomorphic cryptosystem? How can I use this additive homomorphic Elgamal cryptosystem for ...
4k views

### Common modulus attack on RSA when the 2 public exponents differ by a single bit

This is an exam question an i have no idea how to recover the message m. John wants to send an encrypted message to mary who has a pair of RSA keys, However, John does not know Mary's public key and ...
732 views

### Adaptive Hash Functions: How to tell how many iterations were used?

If an adaptive hash function like bcrypt or PBKDF2 is used in hashing passwords, the number of iterations used in the hashing process can be configured. For a penetration tester or a malicious ...
226 views

### Is the $\ell$-Diffie Hellman Inversion easy when g is known?

From here they define the $\ell$-Diffie Hellman inversion problem as: Given $g^{a},g^{a^2}\ldots,g^{a^{\ell}} \in G$, compute $g^{a^{-1}}$ Would this problem become easy if the generator $g$ is ...
979 views

### How do I solve this RSA instance for m?

How we can solve this equation and get the value of M? $$8 = M^{13} \mod 33$$ not a computer program, but a mathematical operation.
847 views

### Is a RSA-signature of some identifying data a safe way to implement a license key?

I have this idea of implementing a license key: After the user downloads the program, he connects to a website and sends his Windows product ID. The website, then, sends this back to him with a ...
117 views

### How does one measure the decrease in security, if any, of RC4 when mapping to a specific range of values?

For a project using RC4, the output is to be mapped to values of 0 to 35. Thus, only 36 unique output values representing the letters A to Z and 0 to 9. To avoid bias, the RC4 byte output (with a ...
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 ...
68 views

### Importance of random number generation in Schnorr's signature

In Schnorr's digital signature protocol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schnorr_signature), the signing process (as described in wikipedia) requires the generation of a random bit $r$. I am wondering ...
147 views

### Modular exponentiation on calculator for textbook RSA

How do you encrypt $51$ with public key $(n,e) = (91,23)$ I understand that $c = 51^{23} \bmod 91$. How can I calculate the result on a calculator?
161 views

### How should I generate secure random numbers deterministically?

I have a 256-bit seed; call it P. From P, I need to derive 219 256-bit numbers deterministically. There's a catch, however: I want to derive them in any order. For example, I might need the 7878th ...
123 views

### Data Leakage and Data Switching

I have two secret values $a$ and $b$ (i.e. they are arbitrary values). I mask them as follow: $v_1=r_1a+r_2$ $v_2=r_1(b-a)$ where $r_1$ and $r_2$ are uniformly random values. I send $v_1$ and $v_2$ ...
180 views

### lcm versus phi in RSA

In textbook RSA, the Euler $\varphi$ function $$\varphi(pq) := (p-1)(q-1)$$ is used to define the private exponent $d$. On the other hand, real-world cryptographic specifications require the ...
457 views

### Dan Boneh's Cryptography lecture - problem with 802.11b

I am going through Dan Boneh's Cyprography lectures on Coursera. In Lecture 6 https://class.coursera.org/crypto-010/lecture/6 At 7:30 minutes, he discusses the problems with 802.11b design. I ...
280 views

### An electronic voting system

This semester I am taking the course Cryptography. I will have a presentation about the topic "Voting Scheme". I am preparing myself by reading from the book “Cryptography : an Introduction” by ...
226 views

### What happens when a RC4 stream gets corrupted?

I want to encrypt a large file using RC4. But what happens if the encrypted file gets corrupted (bytes modified or lost)? Can I still decrypt the rest of the file correctly? If not, what is the best ...
152 views

### Randomness re-use in LWE encryption scheme

Let me describe the scheme first, it is the scheme proposed by O. Regev when he introduced the LWE assumption. $sk = \textbf{s} \in \mathbf{Z}_q^n$ $pk = \textbf{A}\textbf{s}+\textbf{e}$ where ...
247 views

### Choice of authenticated encryption mode for whole messages

There are several well-regarded block cipher modes for authenticated encryption which have made their way into standards and protocols: CCM, EAX, GCM, OCB, … If I am designing a new messaging or ...
203 views

### Universal Circuits in Indistinguishability Obfuscation Candidate Construction

I am currently working on an implementation of the candidate construction for an indistinguishability obfuscator that was recently proposed by Garg et al. The relevant paper can be found here. ...
367 views

### Timing Attack on RSA

So far I have researched on timing attack on RSA, We all know the ransomware named Cryptolocker it uses RSA 2048 bit encryption. Now is it possible to break the encryption using timing attack. I have ...
169 views

### ML/NN Cryptanalysis

Is it computationally plausible to use NN/ML to do any of the following tasks? "Real" cryptanalysis. Cyclic neural networks for extended computation, but break the hash all the way through. ...
211 views

### How can I break this encryption scheme?

Let $p$ be a large public prime. Alice holds a private key $(e_1,d_1) \in Z_{p-1}^*$ such that $e_1 d_1 = 1 \mod {p-1}$. Bob also holds a different private key $(e_2,d_2)$ with the same property. ...
502 views

### RSA cipher wrong use

Why is it foolish if you decide to use an RSA cipher to encode some message by first converting each letter of the message to an integer? So for exmaple Space=0, a=1, b=2,... After the conversion I ...
210 views

### Proof that MACing a hash of the message is also a secure MAC

I found a theorem that says: Let $MAC = (S,V)$ be a MAC for short messages over $(K,M,T)$. Let $H: M^{big} → M$. Define $MAC^{big} = (S^{big},V^{big})$ over $(K,M^{big},T)$ as: \$S^{big}(k,m) = ...
11k views

### How are the AES S-Boxes calculated?

I'm trying to understand how the AES S-Boxes are calculated. I understand how the multiplicative inverse is calculated over GF(2^8), but I'm confused by the description of the affine transformation. I ...