# All Questions

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### Why should I make my cipher public?

As I understand it, the less people know about the internals of my protocol or cipher, the more secure the protocol is. However Kerckhoffs's principle states that A cryptosystem should be secure ...
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### Is Diffie-Hellman mathematically the same as RSA?

Is the Diffie-Hellman key exchange the same as RSA? Diffie Hellman allows key exchange on a observed wire – but so can RSA. Alice and Bob want to exchange a key – Big brother is watching everything. ...
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### Cryptanalysis to reverse engineer a hash?

I understand this may not be the best place to ask a question like this, but I believe that this community may be the best/only place I can ask such a question. I have inputs and outputs from an ...
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### Does RSA work for any message M?

I decided to read the original RSA paper A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystem because of a question I had about RSA (which is not the question I'm about to ask, but ...
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### What differentiates a password hash from a cryptographic hash besides speed?

I understand that password hashes like bcrypt have the principal property of taking a long time to run, but I'm wondering what if anything about password hashes make them superior to merely running a ...
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### Why should I use an Initialization Vector (IV) when I have unique keys?

I took a look at “Why, or when, to use an Initialization Vector?” but my question is not the same. I have unique keys encrypting each plaintext (in CBC mode, AES-256) and I do not use a key to ...
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### What is a white-box implementation of a cryptographic algorithm?

What is a white-box implementation? Does a white-box implementation have specific properties?
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### Can ECDSA signatures be safely made “deterministic”?

Using the terminology of the ECDSA wikipedia page, ECDSA (and DSA) signatures require a random k value for each signature which ensures that the signature is different each time even if the message ...
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### Is using slow password hashing on the client side easier attackable than on the server side?

As we know, one should use a slow password hashing algorithm instead of a fast one for storing passwords, to hinder brute force attacks when the database is compromised. The problem with this is that ...
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### What exactly is the base for the KECCAK (SHA3) claim that a security strength of 256 bits is “post-quantum sufficient”?

On page 14 of "Keccak and the SHA-3 Standardization" (February 6, 2013) it says: Instantiation of a sponge function the permutation KECCAK-f 7 permutations: b → ...
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### Hashing or encrypting twice to increase security?

Over on the bitcoin forums I asked why the bitcoin client computes SHA-256(SHA-256(x)) as its cryptographic hash for a variety of purposes. The leading theory--since the bitcoin author has ...
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### RIPEMD versus SHA-x, what are the main pros and cons?

RIPEMD is a family of cryptographic hash functions, meaning it competes for roughly the same uses as MD5, SHA-1 & SHA-256 do. The Wikipedia page for RIPEMD seems to have some nice things to say ...
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### Security strength of RSA in relation with the modulus size

NIST SP 800-57 §5.6.1 p.62–64 specifies a correspondence between RSA modulus size $n$ and expected security strength $s$ in bits: ...
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### Signatures: RSA compared to ECDSA

I'm signing very small messages using RSA, and the signature and public key are added to every message, which requires a lot of space compared to the actual content. I'm considering switching to ...
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### Is the CBC weakness in XML Encryption a new discovery? Are other applications vulnerable?

The RUB in Germany reports that XML encryption is broken. This is essentially the W3C standard for protecting XML documents from prying eyes. Does this mean that an attacker can only see a single ...
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### Can an Enigma-style cipher of sufficient complexity be considered secure in today's world?

Regarding the German Enigma machines, if I recall correctly, the reason they were defeated was because the Allies were able to generate a massive database of possible rotor settings, and because the ...
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### What is the post-quantum cryptography alternative to Diffie-Hellman?

Post-quantum cryptography concentrates on cryptographic algorithms that remain secure in the face of large scale quantum computers. In general, the main focus seems to be on public-key encryption ...
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### Does unbalancing a feistel cipher always improve security? Does it improve security at all?

So according to Wikipedia unbalanced feistel ciphers provide greater provable security. Specifically, they state: The Thorp shuffle is an extreme case of an unbalanced Feistel cipher in which one ...
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### Using same keypair for Diffie-Hellman and signing

Are there any security risks using a single key-pair for both key-exchange and signing? I'm mainly interested in using Curve25519 for key-exchange and Ed25519 for signing. But similar combinations, ...