# All Questions

609 views

### Does RSA padding have to be unpredictable if the payload is?

I'm trying to understand the precise requirements on padding when using RSA for encryption. Suppose Alice uses RSA to encrypt a payload $M$ that cannot be guessed (say, a random nonce): Alice send ...
481 views

### Are there public slow-but-strong algorithms out there that resist brute-force attacks better?

I'm reading that AES uses 4x4 bytes (4*4*8 = 256 bits key) matrix for performances matters (since it's a requirement for common standard encryption algorithms), but are there implementations with ...
146 views

### Practical Uses for Timing Attacks on Hash Comparisons (e.g. MD5)?

Consider the following code snippet: ...
160 views

### In a group, is it hard to calculate the base $g$ given $g^a$ and $a$?

Discrete logarithm, that is: calculate $a$ given $g$ and $g^a$, is assumed to be a hard problem in some groups. Is it also hard to calculate $g$ given $g^a$ and $a$?
189 views

### What makes an algorithm “fast in software” vs. “fast in hardware”?

When reading about different algorithms, I often encounter claims that various algorithms are "fast in software" (e.g. Salsa20) or "fast in hardware" (e.g. DES). What properties make a cipher ...
749 views

### Which attacks are possible against raw/textbook RSA?

The PKCS#1 standard defines multiple padding schemes for signature generation/verification (EMSA-PSS and EMSA-PKCS1-v1_5), and encryption/decryption (EME-OAEP and the less safe EME-PKCS1-v1_5). ...
174 views

### What, cryptographically speaking, is a “long message”?

I have read about long message attacks on some cryptographic hash functions. However, I don't quite understand what is being referred to as a "long message". Also, do long message attacks only apply ...
125 views

### CSPRNG that cannot be used as random extractor

Are there any specific CSPRNG's that cannot be used as randomness extractor within a TRNG? In other words, can you simply provide enough entropy gathered from a good entropy source as seed in any ...
288 views

### Effective security of block cipher – equal the key size, or half the key size?

The Wikipedia “Key Size” article states: The security of an algorithm cannot exceed its key length (since any algorithm can be cracked by brute force), but it can be smaller. … … … Most ...
154 views

### Associative standard cryptographic hash function

I am looking for a standard hash function which satisfies the following property: A hash function $H(a,b) = F(h(a),h(b))$ with $h$ (within $F$) any standard cryptographic hash function and $F$ an ...
435 views

### Shamir's secret sharing scheme - type of channels

For information theoretic security in Shamir's [m,m] secret sharing scheme, do i need both authentic and confidential channels? Another related query is ;is it true that if the channels are only ...
560 views

### Leaving authentication data blank less secure for AES GCM?

The AES GCM example for Ruby / OpenSSL shown at: http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.0/libdoc/openssl/rdoc/OpenSSL/Cipher.html has a GCM example of the following: ...
281 views

### Avoiding overflow when encrypting with RSA

When encrypting with RSA one calculates $m^e \pmod n$ by doing the following: m^e % n Where $m$ is what we encrypt. Often $e$ is a very big number to make it ...
555 views

### DES — Can I recover the key when I have both ciphertext and the plaintext?

Given a message and DES encrypted form of said message, is it possible to efficiently compute the key used to encrypt the data?
526 views

### How to attack a fixed LCG with partial output?

To show some colleague programmers exactly how broken C's rand() is (at least on Windows) I decided to break it. So everyone knows the exact parameters, MSVC's ...
2k views

### How is the key shared in symmetric key cryptography?

Symmetric key cryptography is an encryption system in which the sender and receiver of a message share a single, common key that is used to encrypt and decrypt the message. Is the key public or it is ...
2k views

### Initialization vector in symmetric-key encryption

Can we use symmetric-key algorithms without an initialization vector? I am making an app where both the sender and receiver share a key and there is no way to create an initialization vector for each ...
204 views

### Can you really insert the text you want in one-time pad?

The Wikipedia article "One-time pad ~ Authentication" says : For example, an attacker who knows that the message contains "meet jane and me tomorrow at three thirty pm" at a particular point can ...
361 views

### Finite fields and ECC

I understand modular arithmetic(or at least I think I do!) and I've tried to read and learn about how the Math in RSA works(and I think it went pretty well). I've been reading up on ECC and it looks ...
828 views

### CBC-MAC , fixed length, all blocks returned

CBC-MAC, with fixed length message. Is it safe to return all ciphered blocks instead of the last? My intuition says it is less secure, since is gives an attacker more information. But how could one ...
2k views

### Why is RSA encryption significantly faster than decryption?

I am designing an implementation of RSA . I recorded computation times in Java by using System.currentTimeMillis(). It returned an encryption time of 0.05 ms and ...
762 views

### Can we replace the XOR operation in DES with some other operation?

Can we replace the XOR operation in the DES algorithm with some other operation? If so, does it work for both encryption and decryption?
266 views

### How to generate a random integer in interval $[1, 2^n-1]$ from random integer in interval $[0, 2^n-1]$?

For a project I am working on, I have access to a CSPRNG that outputs a random integer in the interval $[0, 2^n-1]$ for any integer $n$ greater than 0. I cannot use the zero values, so I have my RNG ...
552 views

### Randomized algorithms and the one time pad

The way I understand it, an algorithm is said to be randomized if it uses randomness as part of its logic (quoting Wikipedia). Now, in the case of encryption algorithms, I assume this means that for ...
560 views

### Is there a symmetric-key cryptography based on key establishment techniques?

Most of the current key exchange techniques are based on public-key cryptography. Are there any key exchange/establishment techniques based on symmetric-key cryptography too? In my setup primary ...
591 views

### What's the main difference between Pohlig-Hellman and RSA?

Both Pohlig-Hellman and RSA perform encryption and decryption by exponentiation modulo some integer ($p$ prime for PH, $n$ composite for RSA). They both use a key $e$ as the exponent to encrypt a ...
304 views

### How to encrypt data and know it will be secure for at least a few decades?

I want to encrypt a small amount (few kilobytes) of data and be fairly confident it will be secure against brute force decryption and advances in cryptanalysis for at least a a few decades (or more). ...
964 views

### Is it possible to pick your Ed25519 public key?

Is it possible to generate an Ed25519 keypair that has a very similar public key as another keypair (fooling a casual visual comparison) or is this as hard as solving one of SHA-512 or the discrete ...
278 views

### What is the name of this kind of protocol

There is a communication protocol that I believe creates the equivalent of a one time pad, with the downside that the secret message must be transferred multiple times. The protocol is so simple that ...
392 views

### Can I build a secure tweakable block cipher from a normal one by adding key and tweak?

Let (E,D) be a secure block cipher. Consider the following tweakable block cipher: ...
319 views

### Can a “pattern” in a series of passwords be detected from their hashes (and maybe a single raw password)?

Let's say I'm a lazy user of a system with annoyingly frequent password change policies. I may have a "good" password I used initially that is only used for this system but since I have to change it ...
319 views

### Is there any recent cryptographic algorithm especially designed for low-level processors?

Most modern algorithms require relatively large amount of resources. Is there any recent (and freely usable) encryption/decryption algorithm which is specially designed for low-level microcontrollers ...
417 views

### Key space size when either of two public keys are valid for authentication?

If for authentication a user can own either A OR B public key instead of just one specific key is that equivalent to halving the key space. i.e. it it theoretically twice as easy to brute force and ...
2k views

### RSA: If n=35, show that e will equal d

Show that if $n = 35$ is used as an RSA modulus then the encryption exponent $e$ always equals the decryption exponent $d$? What I have so far: $n = 35$ Therefore $p = 5$ and $q = 7$ or vice versa, ...
2k views

### Decrypting DES with decrypted and encrypted data [duplicate]

I got two 8-byte strings. One which is decrypted is: FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF and one which is encrypted is: ...
426 views

### How can I encrypt more than 64 bit with the Data Encryption Standard?

The Data Encryption Algorithm is designed to encipher and decipher blocks of data consisting of 64 bits under control of a 56-bit key. If my data is more than 64 bits, (suppose 66 or 67 bits), will ...
192 views

### Protocol to generate Client Certificates at the start of a SSL session automatically?

A more secure form of 'cookie' could be created for SSL communications through the following method. The client generates and requests the server to sign a certificate. Then the client authenticates ...
246 views

### Composing two one-way functions such that the result is not a one-way function

Is it possible to have two distinct one-way functions (called, say, $h$ and $g$) such that their composition $h \circ g = [\, x \mapsto h(g(x)) \,]$ is not one-way?
201 views

### Why isn't CTR mode (counter mode) used more often?

For the CTR mode, the design is good for parallelization, yes, it seems the benchmark of the program downloaded from crypto++ proves that on an Intel I7 CPU. My question is that as most of CPU on ...