# All Questions

371 views

### Provable Encryption

Is it possible to encrypt data in a way that it can be proven that the data is encrypted, without revealing the key? Alice chooses some plaintext, then she encrypts it with a certain scheme. She ...
1k views

### Why is ElGamal considered non-deterministic?

One difference between RSA and ElGamal is that ElGamal isn't necessarily deterministic (while RSA is). What makes it non-deterministic? Is this advantageous to security? How else does this property ...
407 views

### What is the appropriate public key encryption for secure coin flipping?

I quote Bobby's question here since I encountered the same one... Random Coin Flip using ElGamal and a Trusted Party Consider the following protocol for two parties to flip a fair coin. Trusted ...
494 views

### Does the XML Encryption flaw affect SSL/TLS?

A "practical attack against XML's cipher block chaining (CBC) mode" has been demonstrated: XML Encryption Flaw Leaves Web Services Vulnerable. Does this weakness of CBC-mode which is used here also ...
179 views

### When is an asymmetric scheme considered broken?

Does the following quote imply that valid encrypted data can be created and decrypted by someone other than the owner of a private key: An asymmetric encryption scheme is considered to be broken ...
2k views

### Brute forcing CRC-32

I'm working on a cryptosystem which uses IDEA. The designer made the mistake of including a CRC-32B hash of the password unencrypted in the header, so that the system can quickly reject bad ...
163 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 ...
76 views

### Authenticating Very Short (Sub-Block) Data

If I'm encrypting very short/small data - like an int or a long (32 or 64 bits), does it make any sense to authenticate the ciphertext, when using an "online" mode of operation (like EAX)? ...
198 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 ...
111 views

### Are variable-length crypto hash functions still susceptible to collisions?

I just recently learned that the SHA-3 finalist Keccak allows for variable length output. As the only answer to this question states, "[it] need to have an output length at least equal to the input ...
146 views

### Do I need to use AE/AEAD in my particular scenario? Or is it redundant?

This is my scenario: A small structured text message (1-2kB) is to be sent over an insecure channel. Everything except for the header portion (which contains a title, timestamp, category and tags) ...
226 views

### Is it secure to use Diffie-Hellman key agreement to generate a nonce?

I have a system, using AES, in one of the modes that uses a nonce and authentication. We have a pre-shared key, and to agree about initial nonce we could use Diffie-Hellman, using the resulting ...
294 views

### Can I create a fixed length output from a fixed length input?

I use AES256 for various purposes in my app. However, the purpose I am now trying to achieve is the following: Input is for example AU00000001 and I would like a ...
304 views

### Is knowing the private key of RSA equivalent to the factorization of $N$?

Given the RSA modulus $N$ the fastest method to factor it is of sub-exponent order. But, now if I know the private key $d$ of RSA, does that mean I can factor $N$ efficiently?. It intuitively seems ...
271 views

### Is Chaocipher a secure cipher under ciphertext-only attack?

Chaocipher was invented by John F. Byrne in 1919. The algorithm was recently revealed – see Moshe Rubin's Chaocipher Revealed, the Algorithm (PDF). While a known plaintext attack successfully finds ...
297 views

### Is it possible to create a “proof-of-upload” system for BitTorrent ratio tracking?

One issue that private BitTorrent trackers that track users' share ratios often run into is how to keep track of people who are screwing with their upload statistics, something known as ...
1k views

### Is PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA1 really broken?

I just read through this article which demonstrates practical (and seemingly trivial) collisions in PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA1, and provides a few examples of collisions. Am I missing something here? Is ...
120 views

### Why has the sponge construction's generic collision finding attack a complexity of O(min(2^(-n/2) , 2^(-c/2)))?

I'm trying to learn about sponge function for creating hash functions and generic attacks on it. I'm looking for the collision finding attack scenario which leads to $O(\min(2^{-n/2} , 2^{-c/2}))$ ...
276 views

### EC ElGamal versus static+ephemeral ECDH

A client application needs to encrypt a UDP datagram for a server with known EC public key $P$. Performing a full ECDH key exchange would defeat the benefit of using UDP as a connectionless protocol. ...
195 views

### Solve a Modular Exponentiation

It might be common, but if we had to solve an equation like this $m=s^{e}$ mod $n$ where $m,e,n$ are known. How can we find $s$. What optimisations could be applied? And what would the complexity of ...
2k views

### Is AES still secure considering all this NSA/Snowden scandal? [duplicate]

Im trying to understand if nowadays using AES is secure or not, after reading some arguments on Schneier’s blog (to be more exact, a comment to “The NSA Is Breaking Most Encryption on the Internet”) ...
156 views

### How can I tell how many bits of security a secure hash function has?

How can I tell how many bits of security a secure hash function has? For example, how would I calculate or tell how many bits of security a secure hash function with 160 bits output would have? ...
235 views

### Can insecure algorithms be combined to form a secure algorithm?

This is hypothetical as I can't think of any reason to do this, but out of curiosity... Could I, for example, take the MD5 digest of a message and concatenate it with the SHA-1 digest (not quite ...
188 views

### Why can an RSA signature be authenticated ONLY with the signer's public key?

I'm an undergraduate Math student currently taking a cryptology course. I have a question about the RSA signature authentication mechanism. An RSA signature can be authenticated with the public key ...
341 views

### How can I implement the elliptic curve MOV attack myself?

I understand and have implemented elliptic curve signatures in Python without the use of libraries like Sage, and would like to implement the MOV attack against certain weak types of elliptic curves. ...
360 views

### Why does only length prepending improve the security of CBC-MAC

I know that length prepending improves security of CBC-MAC. However, wouldn't inserting the length elsewhere (middle, end or any other part of message) be equally good? After all, even the length is ...
510 views

### Increasing number of rounds in AES

AES-128 requires 10 rounds ( AES Description, Wikipedia ) However Bruce Schneier has recommended AES-128 use 16 rounds ( Schneier on Security: New Attack on AES ) Could that be implemented as two ...
6k 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 ...
342 views

### Why to try get key out of white box crypto? How can one protect WBC itself?

Help me understand the following. With WBC the question is mainly being stated as can one try to break WBC to identify the key. My question is: Why would one ever want to do that anyways? If one can ...
666 views

### With a true random number generator at hand, how to implement one-time pad?

I have a Raspberry Pi single-board computer that happened to have an hardware true random number generator, based on some quantum effects on the processor silicon, baked into its BCM2835 chip and I ...
290 views

### Injecting salt into PyCrypto KDF - useful?

I have noted some sources indicate that when using a KDF like PBKDF2 (alternatively) some advocate injecting the salt at the time of execution - like this: ...
5k views

### Does the IV need to be known by AES (CBC mode)?

I was thinking about this today and thought I should ask. I think I understand IV's enough to say that they are basically the same thing as Salts when talking about hashes. They are there to improve ...
851 views

### BCrypt vs Key Stretching MD5

Ars technica posted an article about the latest in cyber warfare from the stuxnet crew. They key stretched MD5 by iterating it 10,000 times. It seems to be effective at handicapping HashCat's gpu ...
201 views

### What should I be aware of when implementing algorithms myself?

I plan to build my own crypto library. The project will be primarily for me to learn (and if useful for no other purpose, that is fine). In the past I have implemented a few hashes, and AES quite a ...
624 views

### Is there a practical security difference between XXX-bit encryption?

I know I'm treading in dangerous waters asking this - my comprehension of cryptography math is sorely lacking. On the flip side it gives me massive admiration for what many of you are able to do. ...
252 views

### What is 'security margin'?

I have been academic papers about Rijndael, Serpent, and Twofish, and there is this term that is vague to me. I cannot find a tangible definition in google. Can someone briefly define, describe, ...
315 views

### Source for examples with broken cryptography

I've heard again and again that many crypto systems have been broken in the past for one reason or another and that it is best to use one that has been peer reviewed, etc etc. However, I've yet to see ...
1k views

### How can I break a Vigenère cipher with partial plain text?

I have an exercise to do regarding Vigenère encryption. I've got the cipher text: WNZTNVIEEGTJYKRRWYUELWNZTNV and a partial plain text: ...
4k views

### What algorithm could/should be used to encrypt files for storage on untrusted servers?

I need an encryption algorithm that works fast on large files and doesn't increase the file size. It should use a key to encrypt/decrypt data. The files will be sent using REST and over HTTPS, but a ...
641 views

### Can I use PBKDF2 for authentication and decryption?

I want to store a hash for authenticating a password. I also want to use the same password for decryption. Can I use PBKDF2 for both? (I plan to use different salts for the authentication and the ...
202 views

### Are there any differences between PIR, oblivious transfer and differential privacy?

I am trying to make a taxonomy of different purposes of some cryptographic protocols. Generally speaking the purpose of PIR, oblivious transfer and differential privacy it sounds like being invented ...
1k views

### Why does CBC decryption with a wrong IV still give readable results?

While developing some code that uses the .NET AesManaged algorithm, I made some mistakes but was surprised at the results. My encryption was correct. I was generating a random IV block and writing ...
2k views

### Sending KCV (key check value) with cipher text

I was wondering why it is not more common to send the KCV of a secret key together with the cipher text. I see many systems that send cipher text and properly prepend the IV to e.g. a CBC mode ...
879 views

### Stretching a random seed to maximize entropy

I'm using a random number generator that requires me to pass it a big (several kilobytes) pool of random data for initialization. I've gathered entropy from various system metrics (free memory, ...
649 views

### Malleability of ElGamal and Hashed ElGamal

Question: Suppose A encrypts a number $x$ which indicates her bid on a contract, using ElGamal encryption. Say that the encryption of $x$ produces a ciphertext $c$. Explain how E can modify $c$ to ...
268 views

### Derived Shared Key vs Distinct Keys?

I've seen a lot of 2-party applications that derive a shared key from distinct keys created by each party. Why is this technique employed? Would it not be better to use those two distinct keys for ...
214 views

### Reusing the random exponent for ElGamal encryption with different plaintexts

In the basic ElGamal encryption scheme, we encrypt a message $m$ as $(g^r, h^r m)$, where $g$ is the group generator and $h$ is the public key of the recipient. If the sender has another message $m'$ ...
81 views

### Signing Files vs. Signing File Hashes

What are the security pitfalls that may occur by signing a list of file hashes, versus signing individual files? In short, the security trade-offs between: ...