All Questions

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How does cryptanalysis of the Playfair cipher work?

I have a set of Playfair-enciphered data that I'm trying to crack without the key. I know I need to analyse bigrams; I've currently worked out what decrypts to th, ...
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What security do digital signatures provide (like used when signing PDFs)?

I want to ask you one question about digital signatures as they are (for example) used when digitally signing PDFs. We know that if our document has a digital signature, we can detect if the original ...
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How to choose keys for a block cipher?

AES and DES are block ciphers. Mathematically, its the mapping from plaintext space to ciphertext space using the keys i.e. $\{{0,1}\}^k$ x $\{{0,1}\}^l \longrightarrow \{{0,1}\}^l$ I know that these ...
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Can a PRNG with a fixed amount of entropy always be detected?

Given a fixed seed (i.e. no ongoing source on entropy), is there (practically or theoretically) any PRNG algorithm that can generate an infinite sequence of random numbers such that an observer cannot ...
337 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 ...
257 views

Fractal Merkle Traversal

I am studying Fractal Merkle Tree Traversal algorithm in the book “Post Quantum Cryptography” (PDF). On the [pag. 54] I don't understand this paragraph: We may determine the number of pebbles ...
387 views

How Were secp*k1 elliptic curve generators chosen?

The Koblitz elliptic curves specified in the SEC2 document https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.secg.org%2Fcollateral%2Fsec2_final.pdf all have the nice feature that the parameters are ...
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This question is related to this one in intention, and this one in scope. Would I be guarding myself against future attacks on a single PRNG if I combine two (or more) together? I am thinking of ...
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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 ...
183 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 ...
933 views

Decrypting files with an unknown method but a known result

I am assuming there is a very simple way of working this out by brute force, but I am not sure if there is a better way. I have a file of data that I wish to get (my data, generated by a machine). ...
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How do you find the inverse degree of a hash function?

I am trying to learn cryptanalysis on the Keccak hash function. One of the papers on zero sum distinguishers talks about Keccak having inverse degree of 3. I am unable to figure this out: how do you ...
698 views

Can two cipher letters per plaintext letter easily defeat character frequency analysis?

For a class 5 years ago I wrote a paper about "defeating character frequency analysis by using two cipher letters per plaintext letter" ...
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How hard is it to generate a partial RSA fingerprint collision?

When I use SSH to log into a new system, I get asked to verify that the fingerprint (a 32 hex digits string) of the hosts's RSA key is correct. How much if it must I actually compare (by hand/eye) to ...
141 views

low-exponent RSA

I have questions from http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F3-540-68339-9_1 Suppose we have 2 messages $m_1$ and $m_2$ related by a known relation $m_2=m_1+1$. Suppose further the messages are ...
919 views

Security of authenticated encryption modes GCM & CCM

I have two questions for Clarification for AE mode choice criteria GCM : it appears to be actually the most popular and widely used AE mode of operation. however it is also well-known to be highly ...
204 views

Questions about the ideal cipher model

I've read that we can study the security of modes of operation by assuming the use of an ideal block cipher. I've also seen a paper suggesting that the ideal cipher model could be something else than ...
608 views

Hill-cipher, disordered alphabet

I am going to apply a simple substitution cipher to my input, then encrypt the result with a Hill cipher. How can this be broken, in a chosen-plaintext threat model? In other words, instead of the ...