# All Questions

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### ElGamal and Schnorr groups

As I gather, a normal practice for choosing a cyclic group for ElGamal key generation is to find a safe prime $p$ and use a multiplicative cyclic group with modulus $p$ and order $q = (p-1)/2$. ...
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### 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 ...
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### Is it possible to perform one-way Diffie-Hellman MITM?

Here's something that is bugging me recently: suppose that me and my friend establish an OTR session and - as a result of that - DH key exchange is performed. My friend verifies my key, but I cannot ...
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### How much work is required to detect multiple collisions for a hash function?

Assume an ideal hash function of output size n bits, detecting one collision requires approximately 2^(n/2) evaluations of the ...
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### Security issues for integrating AAA and OTP services [closed]

What are the main security issues for integrating AAA and OTP services. In our organization with about 1000 clients, we want to integrate the services. What are the main security issues about the ...
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### Should the nonce passed to GCM be authenticated?

This answer recommends authenticating the IV with HMAC when using AES and then HMAC. Since AES-GCM provides authentication too, should the external nonce passed to GCM be authenticated separately ...
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### display an image encrypted with ECB [closed]

On wikipedia there is an example of a picture encrypted with ECB: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operation#Electronic_codebook_.28ECB.29 I just wanted to know how an encrypted ...
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### Security aspects of using a global values as nonce and additional data for AES? [closed]

is it a good idea to use global values as nonce / additional data? What problems can occur? What should be take in account when we deal with such parameters for encryption. Thanks
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### Simple message authentication code

I used to figure that message authentication codes function like digital signatures: a hash of a message is calculated and then encrypted with a secret key. To verify the authenticity of a message, ...
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### Reusing one-time-pad with random plaintext

I understand that by definition one-time-pad keys cannot be reused but I was thinking about the case where it is used to send random data and couldn't find anything on the subject so here is my idea: ...
146 views

### How does RSA padding work exactly?

I've read everywhere online and people say plain text RSA is very unsafe. To make it safe you pad it but no examples are shown anywhere on how to do it. It's explained that random data is added to the ...
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### Diffie-Hellman on infinite groups

The most common groups to be used as examples for the DH protocol are modular multiplication and elliptic curves. But I've realised that the groups doesn't need to be finite, a suitable infinite group ...
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### Why the data length is shifted 3-bit in MD4 Java implementation? [closed]

In RFC 1320, It is stated that "A 64-bit representation of b (the length of the message before the padding bits were added) is appended to the result of the previous step. In the unlikely event that b ...
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### Is it an example of bilinear pairing?

Consider a bilinear pairing $e: G_1 \times G_2 \rightarrow G_T$. Let's assume, $G_1 = G_2 = G_T = (\mathbb{Z}_n,+)$, i.e. additive group of integer modulo $n$ and $e(x,y) = xy$ mod $n$. Isn't it an ...
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### How does cryptanalysis of the Playfair cipher work?

I have a set of Playfair-enciphered data that I'm trying to crack without the key. I know I need to analyse bigrams; I've currently worked out what decrypts to th, ...
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### Secure way to encrypt and decrypt a folder on Mac or Linux? [closed]

I am looking for a way to securely encrypt files on Mac and Debian. OpenSSL comes pre-installed on Mac OSX and Debian/Ubuntu. Therefore, is this a safe/recommended way of encrypting individual files? ...
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### chameleon signature vs regular signatures

I am trying to understand the practical usage of sanitizable signatures particularly on Chameleon Hashing and Signatures. Chameleon hash, or trapdoor function allow parties with the knowledge of the ...
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### Is RC4 +XOR secure for small data?

I need to encrypt transmission between my device (with AVR processor) and base. I create packet data - it will be encrypted into string: ...
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### wireless network security protocol

In network security, encryption and integrity done by the same algorithm that is AES-CCM in that MIC generated by CBC-MAC and encryption done by CTR mode. So suppose I want to do encryption with any ...
115 views

### BEAST attack confusion

I understand that BEAST is a CPA using javascript injected onto the browser's webpage. Apparently the thing that BEAST exploits is the fact that the IVs are predictable. What I'm confused about is why ...
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### Why can't I use ECB with some obfuscation for transient RAM?

I understand that ECB does not hide data patterns well. But my understanding is that it cannot be broken to "know" the underlying message. If that was the case, why can't ECB be used with some ...
111 views

### HMAC-Ripemd-160 in TrueCrypt

I'm wondering if it is still secure. I know TrueCrypt closed its doors but I continue using it because the cryptoaudit didn't find any huge bugs or security issues in TrueCrypt. But I have a bad ...
225 views

### Is there a kind of OS entropy pool on Windows systems? [closed]

I am wondering if Windows provides an equivalent of /dev/urandom from linux ? Or any kind of system entropy pool ?
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### Practical Attack on RSA

Currently I am designing an RSA based application, and I am thinking of how long should the key be in order to be secure against attacks. I know that RSA 4096 bit key can be recovered using Sound ...
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### chacha20-poly1305 padding and length encoding

The AEAD construction for chacha20-poly1305 described in the IETF proposal [1] encodes message lengths into the text that is to be hashed. The newer proposal [2] goes further and pads associated data ...
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### Differential Privacy and appropriate noise distribution

In differential privacy solutions and more specifically for queries that they do entail counting the proposed solutions define the Laplace distribution that is best calibrated for low error. Other ...
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### Feldman's VSSS: Showing the Correctness of shares that are Consistent

This is something with which I am struggling to get my head around. In Feldman's VSSS, I am aware that the Dealer broadcasts exponentials $a_{1},...,a_{t-1}$ of the secret $K$ and the coefficients ...
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### Problems in the results of NIST PNRG suite

I am a beginner in the field of cryptography.I have problems interpreting the NIST (sts-2.1.2) suite results. After running the statistics with 100 samples (each sample of 1000000 byte length) a new ...
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### Why should I use X.509 Authentication over PKC based Authentication?

So I have two examples and I don't understand why one would be chosen over the other. Example 1. A sends EPUb[r1] to B (asks B to prove knowledge of ...
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### Performing HMAC with random key before MAC comparison

In Laravel (a PHP framework) I can see that they calculate a HMAC with a random key over the final HMAC before comparison. This additional HMAC calculation is of course performed for both the ...
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### How to implement HMAC SHA-256

I am trying to figure out how the HMAC SHA-256 hashing algorithm works. I know that we have to use the following: H (K ^ opad)|| H ((K ^ ipad)|| text)). The ...
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### Verifying identity using a sha-1 hash

I was reading http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=74 which is about a Windows kernel developer. The developer proves that he is an actual developer by posting the SHA1 hash of a particular revision of a file. ...
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### What if OT breaks in Yao's garbled circuit?

Two semi-honest parties are computing F with Yao's garbled circuit. Sender garbles it with his inputs baked in then sends it to the receiver. At this point the receiver must use OT to get his keys. ...
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### RSA signing security

I'm curious about the security of RSA signing with the same public private key pair when the same message is sent multiple times. It's my understanding that once you generate the hash of the message ...
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### Pollard's Rho - Restricting the random function to the exponents

Pollard's Rho is usually constructed using a function $f:G \rightarrow G$ which behaves 'random enough' in order to detect a collision with Floyd's cycle detection trick. It is easy enough to observe, ...
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### Exploration of Blum Micali Security By Seed Size

I'm new to cryptography and am most intrigued by mathematically based pseudo random number generators. With reference to the Blum Micali algorithm: $X_{i+1} = G^{X_i} \bmod P$ can security be ...
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coded text: ij gj hnev xudmyx hn igim umif obaxidyw kxzq si the key is JULIET, but i cannot figure out how it is used. Any help would be awesome!
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### Help converting sha256 to 32-bit stream

I need some help with hash value calculation. I am a bit confused by this statement that I found on w3 website on calculation of a DigestValue for xmldsig ( ...
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### Is ASCON cipher broken?

http://eprint.iacr.org/2015/030 present several attacks of ASCON but does not have a conclusion section. I'm having troubles estimating what are the consequences on the use of ASCON. What's your ...
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### How does bitmessage encryption work?

I have been reading around protocol specification and there is either too much technical detail or too bad articles on various sites. I need you to explain in simple words how encryption in ...
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### How does multi platform encrypted cloud storage work?

I'm really interested in end-to-end encrypted cloud storage and couldn't find out how following scenario could work: A user of a cloud provider which provides zero-knowledge-authentication (like for ...
118 views

### RSA public key exponent generation confusion

Quote from Wiki: $e$ having a short bit-length and small Hamming weight results in more efficient encryption — most commonly $2^{16} + 1 = 65537$. However, much smaller values of $e$ (such as $3$) ...