# All Questions

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### SHA256-based stream cipher

Can anyone comment if the stream cipher described here is safe? The author claims it to be unbreakable, but does not provide any evidence or proof to support this. For completeness, I have reproduced ...
52 views

### How to know private key is computed from specific partial private key?

In a certificate-less cryptography, I have learned that – to resolve the key escrow problem of IBE – the concept of a partial private key is used. Now, consider the following Scenario: After ...
73 views

### Is it possible to deduce the IV from CBC ciphered data, without knowing the key?

The question came up here, which left me thinking: Is it possible to deduce the IV from CBC ciphered data, without knowing the key? And if not, why is it considered a bad idea to create an IV by, for ...
109 views

### Why do we encrypt-then mac but sign-then-encrypt?

This question was asked in comments on my answer to should we sign then encrypt or encrypt then sign. I think posing the question as a separate entity is best, so: The general advice for applying ...
63 views

### Does displaying HMAC hashes of user inputs compromise the HMAC validation?

Here is the scenario: "SECRET" is a secret key that is kept private and only used in this one application. The application allows users to enter in any "VALUE" (within various open-ended limits such ...
2k views

### How to attack a classical cipher using known partial plaintext?

I have a ciphertext generated by a classical cipher. I do not know what was cipher used to generate it. I do however have the beginning of the plaintext. What are the cryptanalysis approaches for ...
56 views

### Secret Sharing 1 Required

Devise a scheme so that a message M can be shared among X, Y and Z in such a say that the only way of recovering the message is when X is present with either Y or Z. When X isn't present or each is ...
120 views

### Convert SpookyHash to semi-secure 192bit hash [closed]

What do you think of converting SpookyHash into semi-secure 192bit hash function by this way: increase security by using 8 * 8byte = 512bit blocks instead of 8 * 12byte blocks, but remaining 8 * ...
256 views

### RSA Key Generation Parameters - public exponent, certainty, string-to-key count

I want to know what values are appropriate for the public exponent and certainty when generating an RSA Key (for example using Bouncy Castle RSAKeyGenerationParameters function). What is the ...
37 views

### Locally Dedcodable Codes and Private Information Retrieval

Does anyone know about Locally Decodable Codes (LDCs)? It seems the private information retrieval schemes that based on LDCs are computationally efficent (answer a query without processing the whole ...
102 views

### IV = Filename XOR CipherKey?

i want to encrypt transparently using Rijndael. So this is, what I thought of and I would like to have an opinion from "Experts" whether this will harm encryption strenght. I am using chunks of 1MB ...
55 views

### What's wrong with this “order-preserving MAC” function?

Please note: this is purely a thought experiment and not intended for any real-world usage! I came up with a simple function $\mathrm{OPF}$ to map the integers $[0,C)$ (where $C$ is the "ChunkSize") ...
57 views

### Multi cipher CTR

What is your opinion on this scheme: 1)get IV from CSPRNG 2)set 3 encryption keys k1,k2,k3 (3*key_lenght) (KDF/PBKDF) 3)Use 3 ciphers in CTR mode like this: The initial IV is encrypted using ...
262 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 ...
441 views

### Randomness test question from FIPS 140-1 and comparison with 140-2

In FIPS 140-1 there are 4 statistical random number generator tests (The Monobit Test, The Poker Test, The Runs Test and The Long Runs Test. Then FIPS 140-2 came along and supposedly tightened the ...
251 views

### Secure AES Key Generation via Salsa20?

I am not creating my own cryptography or anything, but to learn about the Dos and Donts of cryptography, I am looking into AES encryption and ways to generate keys for that. As far as I've ...
68 views

### Compression step of PGP

We do compression in PGP. Does this step increase/decrease or either have any effect regarding the authentication of a message?
169 views

### Can I use Shamir's secret sharing scheme for multiplicative homomorphism for secure multiparty computation?

I would like to perform a dot product operation among $m$ parties using Shamir's $(m,m)$ secret sharing that is used for Secure Multiparty Computation. I am aware that Shamir's $(m,m)$ scheme is ...
164 views

### How could Fully Homomorphic Encryption support power operations?

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) enables arbitrary functions computed on encrypted data, because it supports both addition and multiplication. But I wonder if FHE supports power operations. For ...
112 views

### Is it possible to determine or estimate the period for Blum-Micali PRG?

The Blum-Micali is a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator. The construction (from wikipedia): Let $p$ be an odd prime, and let $g$ be a primitive root modulo $p$. Let $x_0$ be a ...
225 views

### SHA-256 Partial Collision of initial 36 bits and more

I was lucky enough to, by brute force, have found two different messages, whose SHA-256 hashes collide in the first 9 hexadecimal characters, which are 36 bits, ...
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### Is that possible to use encryption higher than 256-bit?

When browsing websites with Chrome sometimes I can see a green lock and encryption info inside. It says the connection with this website is 128-bit or 256-bit encrypted with TLS1.2. So I'm wondering ...
319 views

### How do I create a short signature? (e.g. less than 100 bytes)

I want to put information into a QR code and have it signed so that the authenticity of the information can be verified. But QR codes have limited storage capacity and when I used e.g. gpg I get ...
133 views

### Thoughts on secure hashing and the “mds” algorithm

Almost a decade ago Raymond Chen blogged [1] about the "hash reset attack" cautioning developers to record the content length in addition to the message digest. Recently I came up with a variation on ...
3k views

### HMAC-SHA1 vs HMAC-SHA256

I have three questions: Would you use HMAC-SHA1 or HMAC-SHA256 for message authentication? How much HMAC-SHA256 is slower than HMAC-SHA1? Are the security improvements of SHA256 (over SHA1) enough ...
179 views

### A specific way for deniable encryption

I read the summary of deniable encryption on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deniable_encryption Then I read a question, by doom123 on security.SE: ...
201 views

### Private RSA key for HMAC key

I am creating software tokens for future request authentication, and I want to use an HMAC for the token to make them tamper-resistant. To ensure I can check the HMAC later I need a secret, persistent ...
38 views

### Delinearization in whitebox techniques

I'm reading through Chow et al.'s paper and Link et al.'s paper. There's a part I don't understand about Delinearization. They convert some steps of AES/DES into a Matrix, then divide the matrix in ...
94 views

### Key-dependent encryption in TAHOE-LAFS

TAHOE-LAFS uses a form of "key-dependent encryption", in that a private key SK is encrypted with the truncated hash of the private key: ...