# All Questions

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### RSA: Most significant key bit always 1?

Is it possible to say that the most significant bit of an RSA private exponent is always 1? Wouldn't that weaken the key strength by exactly that one bit? I refer to the paper "Timing Attack: What ...
134 views

### Where is SRP-Z from?

The Stanford license for SRP says: Broader use of the SRP authentication technology, such as variants incorporating the use of an explicit server secret (SRP-Z), may require a license; Yet ...
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### Why pairing based crypto is suitable for some particular cryptographic primitives?

Why pairing based crypto is being widely used in some special crypto primitives as ID based crypto and variations of standard signatures? I mean taking as deep as possible what makes it suitable for ...
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### Question about HMAC with SHA1

I would like to make sure I understood HMAC. Wikipedia declares it like: $$\operatorname{HMAC}(K,m)=H((K\oplus\text{opad})||H((K\oplus\text{ipad})||m))$$ If I want to use HMAC-SHA1, am I correct to ...
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### Computational feasible to reverse MD5SUM?

This might be out of ignorance, I apologize, but how complex of a problem might it be to generate a file of size $N$ whose MD5SUM is $X$? For example, ...
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### Symmetric encryption mode where ciphertext size is plain text size

I've had many questions on Stackoverflow on how to minimize the output of a cipher - during encryption of course - to the same size as the input. Obviously this is possible for a single block of ...
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### Small Quantum Signatures - Reality check needed

I've been thinking a bit lately about how to get quantum resistant signatures fast and (relatively) small. One idea I've been keen on exploring is finding a crypto PRNG that allows fast-forwarding, e....
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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 ...
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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 $x$ ...
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### Need help understanding this exercise's solution

We were given this exercise, which asks us to identify the types of keys used on this diagram: The solution was Kxa -> A's private key Kya -> A's public key KxB -> B's private key My question ...
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### Salting Hash stored on RFID tag?

In my application, I am trying to prevent counterfeit widgets from being used on our gadgets; think HP ink-cartridges. I will be doing such with UHF RFID tags embedded in the widgets. Unfortunately, ...
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### How are the IVs of SHA512/256 and SHA512/224 calculated?

This seems odd to me, because there are a lot of resources out there saying that the initializer values of SHA512 and SHA384 are the first 64 bits of the fractional parts of the square roots of prime ...
789 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 ...
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### 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." ...
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### Combining secure hashes with insecure hashes?

Assuming I'm a bank which seeks for secure hash functions to use in the process of signing on digital contents. I'd like to explain / prove why using each one of the following hash functions might ...
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If I want to generate a few one-time pads, is it OK to just read required number of bytes from /dev/urandom without weakening information-theoretical security?
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### Getting the encryption method and key from the encrypted data and the raw data

I have some pairs of plaintext and ciphertext data, from which I need to be able to decrypt the other passwords stored in the database. The password field typically contains something like ...
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### Why is the simulation required in these identity-based encryption security proofs?

In identity-based encryption papers (i.e.this) it is very difficult for me to understand security proof. I don't know why they prove assumption (BDH, BDDH) for security of their scheme. Some uses ...
266 views

### Can you really insert the text you want in one-time pad?

The Wikipedia article "One-time pad ~ Authentication" says : For example, an attacker who knows that the message contains "meet jane and me tomorrow at three thirty pm" at a particular point can ...
393 views

### Security issues of a MAC-then-Encrypt-then-MAC approach?

Encrypt-then-MAC does provide ciphertext integrity, but no plaintext integrity. With MAC-then-Encrypt it’s the other way around: Plaintext integrity but no ciphertext integrity. What comes to mind is ...
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### Theoretical decryption of RSA

I am currently looking into RSA and have some questions. I am interested in theoretical answers, assuming there is infinite time for decryption. Is it necessary to work out the private-key exponent ...
835 views

### Encrypted counter as IV in CBC mode encryption using same key

I'm currently working with a secure transport protocol that defines the IV to be a counter (incremental nonce) to be encrypted with the same key. This is a followup to a protocol that did not provide ...
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### Is authenticated encryption basically a lockable box?

I recently used a custom construction as a commitment scheme, which was taken from the standard picture you give people while explaining commitment schemes. Basically commitment schemes can be ...
4k views

### Why is Serpent faster than AES in this benchmark?

I have a laptop without the AES-NI CPU instructions but with SSE4.1. I'm using Linux and tried the (in-memory) cryptsetup benchmark to get the rough tendency which returned: ...
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### Which is/are the strongest known Fully Homomorphic Encryption scheme(s)?

As it is discussed here that the highest security any homomorphic encryption scheme is at most IND-CCA1, Is there any known fully homomorphic encryption scheme that achieves this security level? Out ...
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### Straightforward method for hampering frequency analysis on deterministic encryption

I'm brainstorming some different ways of making deterministic encryption more secure. I want to use deterministic encryption to preserve searchability over the keywords in a document set. However, I ...
523 views

### Is there a way to do fair exchange between two parties who don't trust each other?

Let's suppose we have an Alice who knows a secret key A, and Bob who knows key B. Using their own keys, they each encrypt a message (Alice encrypts $m_A$, Bob encrypts $m_B$) with their own key, and ...
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### 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 ...
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### Even passwords are vulnerable to hash collision attacks?

As stated in this page large documents hashed using md5 maybe vulnerable to collision attacks. My question is even passwords of 6-30 character are vulnerable to such hash collision attacks? If yes, is ...
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### Why does GPG ciphertext length differ with fixed plaintext length?

Thank you for your reply. Based on your inputs. I was investigated further, find details below Step 1) Input string for encryption is UUID format Input data = c0c6f311-a793-4d65-9374-1c0e45f5382c ...
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### Making Pascal Paillier' output absolute

Can we make subtraction result of cipher texts encrypted by Pascal Paillier absolute. Just like we use method Math.abs() in Java ? For example, if we subtract 0 from 1: 1-0 = 1, it is positive but 0-1 ...
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### Why can't garbled circuits be reused?

There are a bunch of papers do research on resizable garbled circuits. But I wonder why garbled circuits cannot be reused? For example, the constructor constructs a garbled circuit of "AND" like this:...
548 views

### Two-timing a one-time pad [duplicate]

Is a one-time pad still breakable on a depth of 2+ if the plaintext is completely random? I'm assuming this idea is wrong, mostly because it occurred to me, but let me walk you through my logic so ...
276 views

### Homomorphic encryption for vector addition

Building on the question and answer from Addition-only PHE in F# which ponders homomorphic cryptosystems to navigate, relatively, a single dimension without revealing absolute position (an encrypted ...
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### How can I prove/disprove that a construction yields a secure PRG?

Let $G:\{0,1\}^{*} \mapsto \{0,1\}^{*}$ be a secure PRG. Prove or disprove that the following construction also yields a secure PRG. $$G'(k) = G(k||0),$$ where $||$ denotes the concatenation of two ...
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### 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 ...
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### Non-linearity of a boolean function

What's the definition of non-linearity of a boolean function? Roughly saying it is minimum number of times it equals any affine function. But I don't get it mathematically. For example, if \$f = ...
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### How to attack this authentication protocol from “Cryptography: An introduction”

Consider the following protocol (from the book "Cryptography: An introduction", by Nigel Smart): ...