# All Questions

210 views

### Are there any elliptic curve asymmetric encryption algorithms?

RSA offers the functionality of encrypting (short messages, or symmetric keys) with a public key, and decrypting with a private key. However, RSA key generation is extremely expensive, especially for ...
110 views

### does re-encrypting the same value with multiple keys reduce security

I found myself wondering today, how much security is lost if you take a plaintext - assume that its content, including any metadata is unknown to an attacker, for example it may be random data - and ...
105 views

### XOR with constant key in CBC mode

I have a hypothetical encryption scheme where somebody uses the one-time pad in CBC mode. That is, the block cipher is $E(k, m) :=k⊕m$, and that block cipher is used in CBC mode. Now, I am assuming ...
64 views

### Compression step of PGP

We do compression in PGP. Does this step increase/decrease or either have any effect regarding the authentication of a message?
137 views

### Is that possible to use encryption higher than 256-bit?

When browsing websites with Chrome sometimes I can see a green lock and encryption info inside. It says the connection with this website is 128-bit or 256-bit encrypted with TLS1.2. So I'm wondering ...
194 views

### Is PKCS #1 v1.5 RSA encryption padding secure under these conditions?

The PKCS #1 v1.5 padding scheme for RSA has been proven to have some weakness when used with TLS for example. My question is: is it still secure under the following conditions? Alice sends a ...
75 views

### How can I find the order of the group that an elliptic curve is defined over?

I have a Weierstrass elliptic curve (y^2=x^3+a*x+b (mod p) ) How can I find the order of the group itself? I have seen Mathematica has a GroupOrder[] command and WolframAlpha will do it for me, but ...
90 views

### Quadratic Sieve: what's the next step after it fails?

Factoring some 20-45 digit values n with a (simple) quadratic sieve, the quadratic sieve may end up with pairs of x and y s.t. $x^2 \equiv y^2 \pmod n$, but neither x+y nor x-y has a nontrivial gcd ...
75 views

### What is the importance of the $r$ and $c$ values for the Sponge Construction?

What is the importance of the $r$ and $c$ values? Keccak[r=1600,c=0] is stated on a calculator on the Keccak website to be a checksum. But I figured if c=0, then there's only one possible output? ...
126 views

### Unpredictability vs randomness

I'm experimenting with creating an entropy source for an environment where I have no hardware available and the language is very high level (executed in a virtual machine). I know it's not a good idea ...
116 views

### Proofs by reduction and times of adversaries

I have some difficulties to understand, when we construct a reduction, how we determine the time for the constructed adversary to break a target security property. In general these details are not ...
95 views

### One-time digital signatures

Are there digital signatures for which, given two documents signed by the same key, one could derive the key? With such one-time signatures, one may be able to design a cryptocurrency based on ...
162 views

### Safe elliptic curve point addition using projective coordinates: How do I tell if the points are the same?

I am trying to implement elliptic curve point addition in hardware for NIST p256 and p384 curves. I have noticed the following issue with the suggested NIST routines: Routine 2.2.7 of ...
139 views

### Is SHA-256 safe when used in this way?

I am wondering whether an attacker can gain any useful information from having several hashes of an unknown plaintext that differs in relatively few bits. For example, if provided with: ...
119 views

### AES: Is it safe to encrypt same cleartext with same key but with million diferent IV?

The encryption mode that I am using is CBC. Algorithm is AES and the key size is 128bit. I will be encrypting a 36 byte string over 1.3 million times with the same key but with a random IV. My ...
498 views

### Good entropy source for generating openssl keys

I need to generate a CA (4096-bit RSA) and server keys for openvpn and I want them to be "top quality". Here is my plan: gather entropy from multiple sources (saving individual files): FreeBSD ...
51 views

### Oblivious Transfer where neither party learns the index of the message

In a traditional Oblivious Transfer setting, the sender has a list $(x_1, x_2, ... , x_n) \in G$ where $G$ is the chosen group. The receiver has $b \in \mathbb{N}$, such that engaging in the protocol ...
229 views

### What are the advantages of CBC over ECB?

From this question I understand that, for a block cipher, using CBC is better than ECB. It seems that if one only has part of the cipher text, then decryption is difficult because the decryption ...
106 views

### ECB weakness and its exploitation

Lets say that I have a server which encrypts information at the server side using ECB mode with the blocksize of 16. If the server appends data that I control with a secret and sends back the ...
200 views

### Is the following authentication protocol insecure?

I am a student taking cryptography this semester. I was just wondering why can't we use this simple protocol? Alice → Open Connection → Bob Alice ← Cert$_b$ ← Bob Alice → {K$_{AB}$}$_{Bob}$ → Bob ...
53 views

### What vulnerabilities would open up if PGP authentication didn't have integrity checking?

It is my understanding that PGP has both an integrity check and an authentication check. What vulnerabilities would open up if it didn't have that integrity check? It seems like the authentication ...
510 views

### Calculation of time to crack SHA-256 hash

A problem is given: 1 million users are authenticated with 9-digit PIN codes (e.g. 343534643). The PIN values are stored as hash values in a database. The hash is SHA-256, and is computed as: ...
135 views

### Increased security weaknesses when truncating SHA1

Given the following preconditions: A plaintext A (~512bit length), that is hashed by using SHA-1 and truncated to (the first) 64 bits. I know both, the plaintext and the truncated hash, and want ...
168 views

Consider the pairing $e: G_1*G_2 \to G_t$. Why we are mapping element from group $G_1$ and group $G_2$ to an element in $G_t$. How are they used in cryptography? What advantages do they provide?
204 views

### File Hash of Encrypted File

Simple question. I have a source file and I have encrypted it with a certain public key. If I take this exact same source file, encrypt it with the exact same key a few hours later would the file hash ...
89 views

### Block Cipher Mode Amicable to Fast Key Change/Rotation Like XOR?

I'm working with documents encrypted in long term storage. When a client requests the document, the document should be delivered encrypted under a distinct key (distinct from the long term storage ...
173 views

### How is an AES Encrypted Message Decrypted with Random Padding?

One thing I was surprised to learn about AES is that random padding can be added to the message to make it a multiple of block size. What I can not wrap my head around is how this random padding can ...
253 views

### What are the pros/cons of using symmetric crypto vs. hash in a commitment scheme?

In a commitment scheme, are there any differences on using a symmetric cipher versus using a hash? If at the "opening", I have to reveal $r$ (a random number concatenated with the messaged at the ...
91 views

### Asymmetric Cryptography Confusion - 'Sign' a file to guarantee its source

What I want to do is use asymmetric crypto to guarantee that a file comes from a source. I have software that runs on lots of wireless devices, and each of those has a license file with an encrypted ...
82 views

### What is the impact of the Goppa code distinguisher on the CFS and McEliece?

What is the impact of the distinguisher for the high-rate Goppa codes (as published in "A Distinguisher for High Rate McEliece Cryptosystems") on the CFS signature scheme and the McEliece/Niederreiter ...
120 views

### Why is $-1$ an illegal message in the Goldwasser-Micali Encryption Scheme

I'm not sure why in the Goldwasser-Micali encryption scheme with a Blum integer $N$, the message $-1$ is always a illegal message. Can you give me some direction for starting? What is illegal ...
264 views

### Serpent cipher : Osvik S-Boxes confusion and test vectors

I'm having hard time with the implementation of the S-Boxes by Osvik found in this paper: Speeding up Serpent. At the end of the paper, all the s-boxes are given and then, I just implement them. ...
266 views

### How difficult is it to brute force d in RSA: d = (1/e) mod φ in a CPT attack?

Given that RSA key generation works by computing: n = pq φ = (p-1)(q-1) d = (1/e) mod φ If I was an attacker who wanted to brute force d, could I brute force d given just the public key, the ...
123 views

### Random session key + predictable IV

I'm using Blowfish in a toy Diffie-Hellman communications scheme. Random session keys are generated for each connection. In this case I can simply feed a null array to the IV right? The same ...
279 views

### Making counter (CTR) mode robust against application state loss

Counter (CTR) mode, which is a block cipher mode of operation, has some desirable qualities (no padding, parallel encryption and decryption), but at the cost of failing badly when non-unique counter ...
131 views

### What does it mean to be simultaneously hardcore?

In this paper the term "simultaneously hardcore" is defined as: "We say that a block of bits of $x$ are simultaneously hard-core for a one-way function $f(x)$, if given $f(x)$ they cannot be ...
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### Salsa20 in Davies-Meyer mode with a fixed key (message): is it one-way?

Say I have a function that calculates a pseudo random permutation and this function is easy to invert. For example $P(i) = AES_k(i)$ where $k$ is a publicly known key. So anyone can compute $P(i)$ ...
243 views

### Proof of elliptic curve difficulty

Are there any proofs that cryptographic functions on an elliptic curve are any more difficult than the analogues over modulo arithmetic? While at present, ECC appears to be more difficult, as it is ...
138 views

### Feedback requested on a method of posting a message without revealing the author

So I was thinking about variations on the Dining Cryptographers problem - In some cases, it's useful to be able to post a message without revealing the source, but with the additional constraint of ...
73 views

### ASN.1 OID of bcrypt

What is the ASN.1 OID associated to bcrypt (the key derivation scheme)? For instance, PBKDF2 has 1.2.840.113549.1.5.12 and it is therefore possible to store a ...
130 views

### salting with password hash to improve security?

Would something like the following improve security (against rainbow attacks, not brute force)? Assume that $P$ is a user-chosen password, and the objective is to obtain a hash $H$ for password ...
135 views

### Finite fields in elliptic curve

I have an elliptic curve defined over finite field where $S_1=aP$ . Is it valid to say that $S_1P$ can also be computed. $P$ is the generator of the group. What my real question is that. Should '$a$' ...
167 views

### How to Compute C^2 in AES MixColumns Matrix?

In mix Columns we have: $$C(x) = \{03\}X^3 + \{01\}X^2 + \{01\}X^1 + \{02\}$$ In Viktor Fischer's Paper on MixColumn and ...
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### Does there exist a two-pass AKE protocol that is secure in eCK model and also has PFS?

As we can know that the best two-pass AKE protocols with DH message can achieve is the weak form of perfect forward security (wPFS) which guarantees security against the passive adversary. But ...
123 views

### Are there any good examples of Contemporary Mechanical Cryptography?

Are there secure mechanical cryptosystems in use today? Not necessarily alphabetic either, ie digital but mechanical?
117 views

### How to compute the attacker's probability?

Given a random bit string $R=r_1r_2\cdots r_n$, let us encrypt each bit $c_i=E(r_i,k_i)$ where $k_i$ is taken from the stream of encryption keys. Suppose that an attacker can guess the correct $r_i$ ...
233 views

### How does partial key escrow work?

It is being speculated that one of the ways that NSA leaker Edward Snowden may have created his "insurance policy"--distributing sensitive documents to various individuals with instructions to ...
169 views

For a stream of packets, where each packet is individually encrypted with a block cipher, it's desirable to have each encrypted packet only valid for that position in the stream. A message number ...