# All Questions

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### Decrypting SHA-256 with SHA-256 as input?

Is there a way to somewhat decrypt a SHA-256 hash, provided that the initial string was also a SHA-256 hash? If not, could anyone link me to a rainbow table containing some of the $16^{64}$ possible ...
52 views

### How does Blom's scheme work?

How does Blom's scheme work? Is the polynomial expression of it a normal one? A few additional questions: How big does the prime modulus need to be? Can it be bigger than the size of the derived ...
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### Entropy calculation

I calculated the entropy for "variable", "property" and their concatenation "variableproperty" (with e.g. the Shannon Entropy) and got $2.75, 2.5$ and $3.33$ respectively. These are all entropy per ...
187 views

### What is the threat to a PKI when the root CA certificate is generated using SHA1?

We have thousands of servers that have been issued certificates signed by our CA using SHA256 but the our root CAs own certificate was generated using SHA1. Assuming SHA1 is no longer secure for our ...
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### How to implement oblivious transfer where probability of the receiver getting secret is exactly 1 out of 4? [duplicate]

As we know that oblivious transfer is done with probability of 1 out of 2. But how to implement it with probability of 1 out of 3 or 1 out of 4??
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### application of algebra to cryptography [closed]

I have taken some courses on algebra like abstract algebra, linear algebra etc. I want to know more on the application of algebra to cryptography.I don't know if anyone can be of help. thanks.
188 views

### How to decode a (Vigenère?) substitution cipher? [closed]

I am trying to decode a message that I suspect has been encrypted with a Vigenère cipher: Utl zluuocp zsc rvzu hbcp ztvibfz vrabzz utl ilry. Utlal flal cb fbaiz, qszu zbsciz. Utvu cllihl vhzb dvil ...
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### Store hashed password using Digest authentication

Digest Authentication is something like this: Server sends client a nonce. Client hashes username and password with nonce. Client sends hashed value back to server. Server validates hash. However, ...
8k views

### Simply put, what does “perfect secrecy” mean?

I would like to ask for a clear (but maybe not so deep) explanation of what the term "perfect secrecy" means. As far as I have researched and understood, it has to do with probabilities of assuming ...
3k views

### Zero knowledge proof protocol example?

Alice is color blind. She never knows if her gloves are matched. Her brother Bob always teases her saying her gloves are mismatched and she should go change them. Alice wants to know if Bob ...
282 views

### Is there any reason to use RSA or DSA when we have ECC?

I am having trouble coming up with a use case for RSA or DSA. It appears that ECC is better in every way. Is this true? I am looking for cases where RSA/DSA is superior to ECC, not where it is used ...
165 views

### Trying to calculate the strength of a Bitcoin brain wallet created with a custom diceware password

I want to create a brain wallet using a custom diceware since I don't like the original one. Instead of 7776 words it has 46656 because I use 6 dice for each word instead of 5, and also it only has ...
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### One time pad (OTP) perfect secrecy with different key space

Let say $K_{0} = \left \{ 0,1\right \}^n$ $K_{1} = K=\left \{ 0,1\right \}^n$ \ $0^n$ $[b\leftarrow \left \{0,1 \right\}, k \leftarrow K_{b}:b=1|k \neq 0^n]$ --- (1) Key is chosen using ...
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### Decrypting messages crypted with one time pad (used more than once)

I have a stream cipher with a key (that is unknown to me) that is used more than once. Messages are ciphered in this way: ciphered_message = message XOR key Let'...
5k views

### Simple digital signature example with number

I've been looking for a simple which signs a number with some randomly generated key and then verified(decrypts the original number) with the public key, which is generated by the private. All the ...
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### Can a list of hashes with property $X_{n+1} = \operatorname{SHA-256}(X_n)$ loop?

This is the situation: I have a list of hashes where each hash is always the SHA-256 of the one above it. If I keep going down the list it must at some point loop since there can only be $16^{64}$ ...
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### 3 digit code at the end of a changing magstripe (maybe hash?) [closed]

Myself and some fellow students are doing some "Independent Security Research" on campus and trying to crack the campus paid parking system to better understand how it might work. The system works ...
1k views

### How do I test my encryption? (absolute amateur)

I am a hobby programmer with a background in biology and have developed an encryption program based on DNA. I tried to make it hard to crack, but it's essentially a substitution cipher and uses the ...
394 views

### How do you test the security of your cipher?

I got asked this question and I didn't know what to answer. How do you test the security of your cipher? What comes to my mind now would be to test it with famous attacks: padding attacks, ...
50 views

### ARC4random – ChaCha-based LibreSSL PRG

Here is arc4random.c from the LibreSSL pseudorandom generator as used in OpenBSD. It works as follows: Take 40 "truly random" bytes from OS (PRG seed); Use the seed as key and IV to generate 1024 ...
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### Does TLS have to provide both confidentiality and authenticity?

I'm working on a project that uses OAuth. In the OAuth RFC it says many times that communication between the authentication server and the client should be with the use of TLS. However, in the project ...
83 views

### Understanding WPA2 authentication in details

As far as I know, WPA2 authentication consists of a 4-way handshake. The first message is from the AP, containing the ANounce, a random number generated by the AP, The second message is from the ...
125 views

I am using Android's keystore to generate a key which is protected by fingerprint authentication. This key can be used to encrypt any secrets. In my case, I want to encrypt a user password (which is ...
75 views

### How to perform AES MixColumns as matrix multiplication in GF(2) (boolean values)?

AES MixColumns is done by multiplying a $4 \times 4$ matrix and a column of the AES state (a vector). Addition and multiplication are done in $\operatorname{GF}(2^8)$. In the paper White-box AES, the ...
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What is it about the architecture of GPG that requires me to enter the password of the secret key when I export it with "gpg --export-secret-keys"? I would expect that gpg can just copy the relevant ...
708 views

### AES CTR with similar IVs and same key

Let's say there is a piece of software that uses AES CTR to encrypt different messages using the same key but with slightly different IVs. So for example, a 16 byte IV, the 2nd 8 bytes are always ...
430 views

### Applicability of birthday attack to AES brute force

Is the following snippet from a recently published cryptography book correct? EDIT: Expand the snippet from the book to make the context (symmetric key search) more clear. You can apply this to ...
67 views

### Hash + Salt v. Hash + Encryption

I was wondering if using a salt with a hash is more effective than hashing and encrypting your hash.
52 views

### Is the complexity of Pollard rho for discrete logartihm really the modulus?

so I'm reading everywhere that the Pollard Rho for Dlog's complexity of $g^a \pmod{n}$ is $\mathcal O(\sqrt{n})$. Shouldn't it be $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{q})$ with $q$ the order of $g$?
60 views

### Stateless proof-of-work system with 0-roundtrip time

I'm designing an API. To avoid abuse, I need to rate limit the requests somehow, but I don't want to do it per user as it's very easy to create new accounts automatically. I think a proof of work ...
61 views

### Named Elliptical Curve parameters

Are named curve parameters always the same? I know this may be a stupid question however I think this is the case. For example the secp256r1 is defined in this documet http://www.secg.org/SEC2-Ver-1.0....
413 views

### Need for salt with IV

I have mainly referred to this question. Definitely in case of using a salt, IV has a use of adding randomisation to each and every key. But isn't it redundant in case of using an IV to use a salt? (...
48 views

### Could a key derivation function be used to encrypt data with a weaker key?

To allow the key to be more easily remembered. Example: To encrypt a hard drive without having a remember a key with 128 bits of entropy. From what I find they seem mostly used to hash passwords so ...
119 views

### How to attack RSA-CRT with large public exponent?

Suppose we have $(n,e)$ and the ciphertext $c$ where the public exponent $e$ is of the same length, 1023-bit, as the modulus $n$. It is also assumed that the factors of $n$ are balanced. The message ...
167 views

### How easily could this method of cryptography be cracked? [closed]

Background A couple of years back, in my naivety, I dreamt up a method to encrypt information. The result can be seen on my website, I evidentially thought it was pretty neat and I decided to mix it ...
129 views

### Why can't NORX produce intermediate auth tags like Keyak can?

Why can't NORX produce intermediate auth tags like Keyak can? Keyak appears quite attractive because of this, but seems to be slow in the absence of hardware acceleration.
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### Practicality of codebook in current-day secret communications

Codebook appears, if I don't err, to be an antiquitated topic rarely touched upon in discussions of modern cryptography. Couldn't codebook nonetheless be of high practical utility and even be ...
152 views

### Help understanding basic Franklin-Reiter related message attack

I am trying to understand this attack at the most basic level. I set up the following basic scenario: Let the public encryption exponent, e = 3. Let p, be some arbitrary but known (to the ...
303 views

### Autocorrelation in Autokey

I know that Vigenère can broken using auto-correlation (as explained at cryptool-online.org). Now my question is: Why does this also work with autokey (tested it using crypttool)? To prove that I ...
95 views

### Parallel variant of Carter-Wegman MAC with incremental property

Is there any variant of the Carter-Wegman MAC algorithm that is fast, parallel and has the property of incremental crypto?
328 views

### Regular MACs vs Carter-Wegman MAC

Carter-Wegman MAC variants (VMAC, UMAC etc) are known to be very fast and efficient when compared to MAC algorithms that are based on block ciphers and compression functions (like HMAC, CMAC etc). ...
619 views

### Does omitting the first two lines of RC4's pseudo-random generation algorithm weaken the cipher?

A particular educational software program published by a U.S. government agency uses a variant of RC4 to obfuscate its data files (see Stack Overflow question). The variant of RC4 in question is ...
184 views

### Is it secure to send the hash along the message without encryption?

Lets suppose Alice send to Bob a message $M$ along with its hash value say $H$ which is calculated using SHA3 algorithm. It is sent on the network where it got read by Eve and she does not make any ...
109 views

### Is BBS used for generation of keys for any modern cryptosystem?

Is there any (current) cryptosystem or digital signature or cryptographic primitive that uses the BBS PRG in order to generate its secret keys?
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### Can a Cramer-Shoup public key have two different private keys?

Since I am new to the Cramer-Shoup algorithm, I would like to know: Is it possible to have two different private keys for a public key due the key pair generation algorithm that Cramer-Shoup uses? I ...