# All Questions

406 views

### Is there an intuitive explanation as to why only the private key can decrypt a message encrypted with the public key?

I have just learned about using PGP/GPG for email encryption and one thing has always bugged me: How is it possible that a message encrypted with somebody's public key can be decrypted only with that ...
192 views

### Security of RSA-substitution-RSA

Following on from here, I am unconvinced that encrypting twice with RSA is a waste of time: doesn't it depend on what is placed in-between the two encryptions?. What would happen if a permutation was ...
105 views

### Approaches to decoding data of an unknown type [closed]

This is a high level question. One area of computer science that I'm working on getting better at is encoding and decoding data. My background is that of a self-taught web engineer who is trying to ...
404 views

### Is a private RSA key vulnerable to a chosen plaintext encrypted with that private key?

I grasp that having known plaintext encrypted with the public key doesn't provide a means of discovering the private key (that being the whole point...). But if one were in a situation where they ...
2k views

### Specification of the Megamos crypto algorithm

It has recently emerged that a paper that was scheduled to appear at Usenix Security 2013, titled "Dismantling Megamos Crypto: Wirelessly Lockpicking a Vehicle Immobiliser", has been censored ...
1k views

### Is truncating a SHA512 hash to the first 160 bits as secure as using SHA1?

I am from a web development background (I don't know an awful lot about cryptography or how the algorithms themselves work), so I am asking this question in simple terms. Consider a hash of the word ...
119 views

### split up sha256 hash and compare indiv block results

We have a h/w accelerator in our SoC and it can do sha256. The restrictions are it's input descriptors (which defines the input packet and len) must not straddle 64K boundary. When it does we can ...
119 views

### Security of a 3-party key exchange protocol

I am trying to find attacks on a theoretical protocol or prove its security. An initiator wants to establish a shared key with a responder with help of a trusted server. We have the following roles: ...
397 views

### Hash function based on pseudorandom functions and security

Are there hash functions that make use of pseudorandom functions. Precisely, I'm looking for a specification of a hash function based on PRF (and based on the security of such a primitive).
96 views

### Hardness of CDH in different groups

What is the difference of the CDH problem in different groups? In particular, given a group $\mathbb{G}_1$ of order $q$ that is a subgroup of $\mathbb{Z}_q^*$, $q$ prime, and another group ...
224 views

### How random is the shared secret in the Diffie Hellman key agreement

Being triggered by this horrible implementation in I2P shown by Sergei at Stackoverflow, I would like to know how random the value ZZ in the DH protocol is. ...
3k views

### What to watch for with openssl generating weak keys? (low entropy)

(Disclaimer: I am regular software engineer with only basic crypto knowledge, so helpful if can be explained for a layman.) I am concerned about generating weak keys on a shared linux box with ...
215 views

### Ed25519 choice of private key implementation

This answer to another question describes the different values chosen as private key and public key by various Ed25516 implementations. What are the advantages / disadvantages of each? (Table ...
120 views

### Cryptography used for login and signing transactions

My bank uses a smartcard reader (separate module not connected to the computer) as depicted below: When I need to log into my account it provides me with a challenge and I need to provide some ...
238 views

### Testing the Fortuna random number generator?

I have implemented the Fortuna random number generator as described in chapter 10 of "Practical Cryptography" (Ferguson and Schneier, Wiley, 2003), the result can be found at ...
567 views

### How can I remove my personal data from my PGP public key?

According to this Q&A-discussion it is possible to remove all personal data (name and mail address) that is attached to a public key. What steps do I have to follow in order to remove all ...
138 views

### Why we must hash lot of times in rainbow tables?

i dont get the utility to chain and reduce in generating rainbow tables. Hash function is made to not have collisions, or at least chain only 2 times so we dont return to the concept of the hash ...
296 views

### Digital Signature size requirement

What is an approximate length for a digital signature (SHA) given the following? Using RFID tags, size ranging from 100 to 2000 bytes (8000 bits), our project is setting aside a portion for a digital ...
395 views

### Practical uses of Manipulation Detection Code (MDC) and IGE

I've just skimmed over most of the paper "On Message Integrity in Symmetric Encryption". I've included (the last) part of the abstract below: We show that generic compositions of ...
125 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 ...
412 views

### Why is it a security problem that two RSA moduli are not co-prime?

I found this security problem, for example: Alice has an RSA public key: $e = 37$ and $\phi$ (totient, $N_A = (pa-1)(qa-1)$) is $55$, so the key is $(37, 55)$. Bob has an RSA public key: $e = 37$ ...
157 views

### Is the polynomial reconstruction problem really “intractable”?

In the family of the believed (experts haven't come yet with a solution) intractable problems in cryptography belongs the Polynomial Reconstruction problem in which an attacker is given $n$ points in ...
125 views

### Is my identity exposed when publishing my public key or encrypting with PGP?

Let's say I create my PGP keys with my appropriate name and email address. Will these personal information be exposed if I publish my public key? When I encrypt a message for sending it to my ...
390 views

### Reduction of Integer factorization to Discrete logarithm problem

I was reading Eric Bach paper entitles "Discrete logarithms and factoring", in which he states the following reductions: solving the integer factorization problem suffices to solve the discrete ...
139 views

### Does any public key crypto support and/or allow a 3rd party “control-key”?

My question is based on the following situation: Bob and Alice work for a company that expects them to exchange data encrypted. They could do so using regular public-key cryptography, but Joe (their ...
205 views

### Toy encryption system that provides “hints”

I'm looking for a toy encryption system that has a specific property that when decrypting it with a key that is close enough to the key used in the encryption, it will produce some of the original ...
155 views

### Is there any weak message for an ECDSA signature?

Suppose ECDSA is used without hashing the message, but directly using a short message (say 10-bytes long) as the value z (using the definitions at ...
249 views

### How can I accomplish Key Derivation in JavaScript?

I need to take a potentially weak user password and derive a strong key for AES encryption in JavaScript. How can I do this? I expect the hardest problem is generating a good random salt - perhaps an ...
166 views

### How can I tell which curve a given ECDSA implementation uses? (P-521 or something else)

I'd like to test and see if certain software uses P-521 ECC curves, or if it uses another variant. Without having access to the sourcecode, or the specification, is there any way for me to test which ...
551 views

### How is input message for SHA-2 padded?

I read about how is an input message prepared to be hashed by MD4,MD5 or SHA-1: Step1 Append padding bits The input message is "padded" (extended) so that its length (in bits) equals to 448 ...
488 views

### SIMON implementation, decryption issues

I've been trying to implement the new SIMON block cipher in Ruby as a personal challenge. The spec didn't include a pseudocode version of the decryption but I thought I had it figured out. The code I ...
194 views

### Efficiency of finding sub group order vs factorization

Suppose you got a prime $p = 2\mathbb\Pi_{i=0}^{n-1}q_i+1$, where $2^{k-1} \lt q_i \lt 2^k$ for some $k$ and all $0 \le i \lt n$, and that you also got a generator $g$ of one of the prime order sub ...
198 views

### Explain the 'Breaking 104 bit WEP in less than 60 seconds' paper

Could you explain the 'Breaking 104 bit WEP in less than 60 seconds' paper, without skipping too much technical details. Could you an answer questions, like: how is '1.24/256' a significant ...
123 views

### How was 256-bit WEP cracked as well?

WEP is now considered as insecure. But how about the 256-bit WEP? Could someone explain why a 256-bit encryption isn't enough? 'A 256-bit WEP system is available from some vendors. As with the other ...
548 views

### AES: keylength and password length? [closed]

What is the difference between the keylength and the length of a password for AES-256?
269 views

### Does it make sense to block RSA keys under 1024 bits?

A paper I found (http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/064.pdf, which was submitted to a cryptography conference about two years ago), is based on the analysis of some 7.1 million 1024-bit RSA keys published ...
188 views

Why do people say that using hash twice or more is bad? yes there is key derivation that do that job, but in a low bandwidth network countries, the solution i see is to use a simple hashing system on ...
199 views

### Is this an acceptable authenticated encryption?

After much deliberation, I've decided to use a normal Encrypt-then-MAC scheme instead of an authenticated encryption mode such as GCM as authenticated encryption primitive. This is due to the lack of ...
95 views

### Secure Sketch Construction

I would like a user to choose a point on an image which is represented by (x,y). This is meant to be a security token. When a user uses this location to login they are unlikely to to choose the exact ...
199 views

### What's the most secure way to derive a key from a password repeatably?

I'm trying to write a cloud storage application where everything the user uploads is unreadable by the server, encrypted client-side before being sent. Currently, the flow looks like this: User ...
101 views

### How difficult is it to find the “pre-image” of a block cipher?

Say that I have $$C_1 = AES_{k_1}(M_1)$$ How difficult would it be to find a key, K2 and plaintext M2 $$C_2 = AES_{k_2}(M_2)$$ such that $$C_1 == C_2$$ How would using a block cipher ...
157 views

### Using same AES-GCM setup for multiple packets?

Most cryptographic libraries I've encountered uses some variant of processPlaintext(...) and then doFinal() to produce the ...
646 views

### Is HMAC-MD5 considered secure?

I've read something to the effect that the HMAC construct is able to lessen the problem of collisions in the underlying hash. Does that mean that something like HMAC-MD5 still might be considered ...
148 views

### Quadratic residuosity problem reduction to integer factorization

How can one show how to reduce the quadratic residuosity problem to an integer factorization?
168 views

### Parallel-resistant proof-of-work scheme?

I am looking for a proof-of-work scheme which cannot be effectively parallelized. For example, in hashcash (and by extension bitcoin) you have some collision-resistant hash function $f()$, a target ...
190 views

### CTR mode nonce with aggressive key rotation policy

I'm writing a small encryption library which will be required to use the shortest possible amount of overhead for describing ciphertexts. I want to use CTR mode with a 6-byte random nonce. Normally ...
110 views

### Is generating public key inevitably slow in classic Diffie-Hellman if the private key is large?

Let's say I pick a 3000+ bit prime $p$ for which I also know that $q = (p - 1) / 2$ is a prime. If I've understood correct, then I can pick pretty much any $g$. Is generating $g^x$ now inevitably ...
297 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 ...