# All Questions

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### GCM: Math behind update of AAD after ciphertext has been processed

In the Bouncy Castle libraries, the GCM cipher implementation has an interesting property that does not seem described in the GCM papers (neither the NIST or the original paper): Some AAD was sent ...
143 views

### Diffie-Hellman when $p$ and $g$ are pre-agreed and hidden from Eve

During a regular Diffie–Hellman public key exchange, Alice and Bob agree to use a prime number $p$ and a base $g$… which are both made public and are therefore also assumed to be known by Eve. Alice ...
747 views

### An unpredictable PRG is secure (Theorem Yao'82)

in the Mr Boneh's online course is stated the following theorem: Let $G:K \to \{0,1\}^n$ be a PRG. “Thm”: if $\forall i \in \{0, … ,n-1\}$ the PRG $G$ is unpredictable at pos. $i$, then $G$...
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### RSA example-calculation: Public Key = Private Key (e = d)

I am a bit confused. I just calculated manually the single steps of RSA for an implementation with small numbers and suddenly $d$ was equal $e$. Please help me understand what I am doing wrong. Here’...
117 views

### Back up an information as $n$ pieces and require exactly $n-1$ to recover it

Let $X\in \Bbb F_2^p$ be some information. How do I create $Y_1,\dots,Y_n \in \Bbb F_2^q$ so that having less than $n-1$ of the $Y_i$s gives you no information on $X$ but having $n-1$ of them allows ...
288 views

### Given a message and signature, find a public key that makes the signature valid (ECDSA)

This question is a variant on Given a message and signature, find a public key that makes the signature valid, which discusses the analogous question for RSA. It was suggested to me by this post over ...
701 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 understood,...
659 views

### For a one-time pad, which MAC method is information-theoretically secure?

In the the main post about MAC methods it mentions a few methods: Authenticate And Encrypt: The sender computes a MAC of the plaintext, encrypts the plaintext, and then appends the MAC to the ...
250 views

### How is HMAC(message,key) more secure than Hash(key1+message+key2)

I understand how for hash functions which are vulnerable to length extension attacks (such as SHA1 and SHA2) it is safer to use a HMAC construction. What I don't understand is, how or why is ...
2k 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 ...
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### What does it mean that $BW_N$ is a permutation over the squares mod N?

Let $BW_N$ be a function such that $BW_N:\mathbb{QR}_{N} \mapsto \mathbb{QR}_{N}$ and let if be defined as follow: $BW_N(x) = x^2 \pmod N$ where $N=pq$ and p and q are primes and $p=q=3 \pmod 4$. I am ...
159 views

### post-quantum threshold secret sharing

I am looking for a references for post-quantum threshold secret sharing schemes. I am especially interested in knowing whether any one based on one-way compressor functions or cryptographic hashes ...
265 views

### When would one prefer a proof of knowledge instead of a zero-knowledge proof?

I've just realized I find it hard to distinguish between these two terms (proof of knowledge, and zero-knowledge proof), specially where only the latter seems to be used in many cryptographic ...
774 views

### Will rehashing an SHA256 hash continually, eventually produce every possible value?

So let's say you had infinite time and energy. You have a hashed string of some sort. Because you have infinite time and energy, you can produce a collision(or the original value) easily enough. But, ...
336 views

### hardware and software optimizations for Salsa20

I'm using the Crypto++ implementation of Salsa20 for a software project we are working on and I'd like to know if there are any SSE or software optimizations that will increase the speed of the CSPNG?
2k views

### Why elgamal is still discussed

As I understand, if two users have a shared key, it is possible to encrypt a message using symmetric key encryption. So when a secret key is shared through Diffie-Hellman asymmetric key exchange, it ...
206 views

### Has it become easier to pre-compute tables after MD5 collisions?

Apparently it is not possible to compute all MD5 values from 0x00000000000000000000000000000000 to ...
622 views

### Can you break a multi language code using Frequency analysis?

Let say that I wrote a 26 letter alphabet, each letter of my alphabet represent a letter from the latin alphabet. I'm writing in 3 languages, only I know which languages. Grammar is the one from my ...
646 views

### Proofs of security methodologies

I'm looking for course material on the subject of proofs, reductions, and games, as used to prove cryptographic schemes secure. What are the methodologies? What are the preferred ones? In what cases ...
442 views

### Security of tokenization of plain text conversations - cryptanalysis

I came across a marketing video here. They claim to perform AES encryption and tokenization of sensitive data, at the corporate gateway, before it leaves the company firewall destined for the public ...
705 views

### Security for IV in AES-GCM mode

I'd like to use AES-GCM instead of HMAC for authentication and privacy in a token used in a web application, but I'm unsure how to securely tag each token with an IV. Is it safe for me to prepend the ...
224 views

### Why work in a subgroup QR(n) of an RSA group $Z^*_n$?

I sometimes read in papers that a (sub-)group generator $g$ is taken from $\mathrm{QR}(n)$ instead of $\mathbb{Z}^*_n$, where $n = p \cdot q$ and $p$ and $q$ are prime. Is there a reason for this? ...
628 views

### DES key expansion: why are these two descriptions different?

I would like someone to explain me how to generate DES subkeys, because in the documentation that I saw, sometimes they say: "We rotate the initial key according to the number of iterations given ...
745 views

### Efficient Symmetric Mutual Entity Authentication Protocol

I am looking for an Authentication protocol for access control. Let's say both the client and server would share a symmetric secret (256 bit key) and the client wants to access the server. Access ...
653 views

### Is there a practical zero-knowledge proof for this special discrete log equation?

We have a multiplicative cyclic group $G$ with generators $g$ and $h$, as in El Gamal. Assume $G$ is a subgroup of $(\mathbb{Z}/n\mathbb{Z})^*$. There are two parties, Alice and Bob: Alice knows: ...
416 views

### Is my password entropy calculation correct?

I have a password with a prescribed format: 111 + “2 Random lowercase letters” + “random digit” As you can see, it starts with a fixed value of ...
223 views

### How long does it take to extract a key from a FIPS-140 Level 2 device?

How long does it take to extract a key from a FIPS-140 Level 2 device? What records are there of successful extraction? How much did the first extraction from a given device cost? How much would a ...
2k views

### How do I calculate CRC32 mathematically? [closed]

I want to calcuate the CRC32 algorithm using polynomials directly but I don't know how. I found the generating polynomial listed here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_redundancy_check. This ...
563 views

### What kind of multiparty computation is this?

The classic multiparty computation protocols are defined around " Untrusted parties trying to compute something together". But is there a cryptographic abstraction for, "Trusted parties trying to ...
900 views

### are CFB and OFB really meant for streaming?

CFB, OFB and other modes are meant for streaming and don't require padding. Are there still limitations such as the text needs to be greater than key length?
1k views

### How to account for moore's law in estimating time-to-crack?

It seems to be common practice (at least in some communities) to tack on the phrase "with current computing power" when estimating the absurdly long time it would take to, for example, brute-force an ...
377 views

### Why are the random exponents so much bigger in the Socialist Millionaire protocol versus Diffie-Hellman key exchange?

Section 8, Security considerations, of RFC3526, which defines groups used for Diffie-Hellman has a table recommending some random exponent sizes. In particular, it says: The strength of a key ...
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### Transforming SHA-512 into SHA-512/256?

Based on my skimming over FIPS 180-4 it looks like the only difference between SHA-512 and SHA-512/256 is the initial hash value and the fact that the final output is truncated to 256 bits. My ...
483 views

### For a given plaintext-ciphertext pair, how many valid AES keys are there?

For $PT\in \mathbb{M}$ and $CT\in \mathbb{C}$, let $\mathbb{F}=\{f|f:\mathbb{M}\rightarrow\mathbb{C}\}$ be the collection of all functions from $\mathbb{M}$ to $\mathbb{C}$. Then AES encryption under ...
237 views

### Should Increment functions be near-constant time?

When operating a block cipher in CTR or GCM mode, should the function used to increment the counter or initialization vector be near-constant time? Here, I'm wondering about the "addition with carry" ...