# All Questions

326 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). ...
5k views

### RC4 Keylength Limits

While reading the Wiki page on RC4 I noticed that the key size must be in the range of 40–2,048 bits. Why is that? Is there a reason it can't have a lower or higher length?
216 views

### Does a high exponent compensate for a low degree of certainty?

If a RSA certificate is created with a low degree of certainty, does the value of the exponent compensate for this? I'm asking because certain implementations of key generation software hide the ...
10k views

### Cipher Feedback Mode

I can't understand what CFB really is. It said in Wikipedia that CFB is same as CBC, but I find that CFB is more difficult than CBC. Can someone explain to me how CFB works. Such as how ...
2k views

### Is it a good idea to use bitwise XOR on a set of MD5 sums?

I have designed an SQL aggregate function in Oracle that bitwise XORs all MD5 sums of the values stored in a column. For example, if my table is: ...
282 views

### SIM security for two messages

Here SIM means the simulation based security Consider a two message encryption scheme:$$Enc:K \times M \times M \rightarrow C \times C$$ and $Enc(K, m, m')=(K \oplus m, K \oplus m')$, In ...
1k views

### Alphabetic Substitution with Symbols

I was reading on a site about the Zodiac Killer and how he used a basic substitution cipher, but instead of substituting english letters and characters he substituted symbols. I was wondering, if you ...
124 views

### How to construct a collision resistant hash function that is not a one-way function?

How to construct a CRHF (collision resistant hash function) that is not a OWF (one-way function)? Not sure but I think it probably needs another CRHF?
160 views

### How secure would hand ciphers be using a Block Cipher Mode?

I've been looking into different ciphers that require very minimal computation power (calculator, deck of cards, index cards and a pencil), i.e. hand ciphers. For the most part all methods typically ...
236 views

### Modular exponentiation on calculator for textbook RSA

How do you encrypt $51$ with public key $(n,e) = (91,23)$ I understand that $c = 51^{23} \bmod 91$. How can I calculate the result on a calculator?
115 views

### Is it okay to use an HMAC of the plaintext and a (possibly distinct) key as the IV for symmetric cryptography?

I was thinking of how to create an IV for a block cipher that doesn't require stored state, and I came up with the idea of using an HMAC of the (padded) plaintext and a (possibly distinct) key as the ...
201 views

### RSA time function

I am doing a paper on textbook RSA (highschool-level). I am explaining and proving the significance of the public key exponent in time and security. So far, I have encrypted a constant message with a ...
841 views

### Is it secure to concatenate two 16-bit random numbers into a 32-bit one?

I'm working on a security application for RF modules aimed to protect a communication between an autarkic sensor and a line-powered receiver against MITM (man-in-the-middle attacks). I decided to use ...
573 views

### Are specially designed fonts sometimes used in cryptography?

As a font designer, I was thinking that it would be very easy to design a special font that could either jumble characters of a language (or of a code) or simply (with the features offered by the OTF ...
8k views

### How does TLS_FALLBACK_SCSV help?

After reading through https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tls-downgrade-scsv-0, I could understand that this option is recommened for use when one has legacy SSL Servers which only support SSLv3. ...
230 views

### Are there valid attacks on full SHA-1?

Google today announced they are sunsetting SHA-1. Its fine by me. But that made me realize I am not keeping up with the research on SHA-1. The Wikipedia page only says Stevens' attack is the most ...
442 views

### Given $n$ bits, how many “truly random” sequences/numbers can be constructed?

Suppose we have $n$ bits, so we can have $2^n$ different bit sequences. Some sequences don't look random, say, all $1$ or $0$. There are also other patterns like $10101010…$, $11001100…$ and such. ...
475 views

### Block Ciphers and (Non-)Generic Attacks

I am currently reading through Cryptography Engineering and came across this definition of block cipher security: Definition 2 An attack on a block cipher is a non-generic method of ...
2k views

### Keeping IV secret for AES CFB mode

I'm developing a security/encryption software and I'm using AES CFB (block size: 16 and key size: 32 bytes). I want to know, if I also keep IV (32 bytes) secret like the key itself (32 bytes), would ...
161 views

### Are ideal hashes possible to create?

In a hash function, you map an input of arbitrary length to an output of finite length such that the relationship is one-to-one (or at least that's what you are trying to achieve). Hence, isn't it ...
605 views

### Why must curve25519 shared secret be hashed?

When using the curve25519 DH function, D.J. Bernstein recommends hashing the shared secret before using it as a session key for a symmetric block cipher. Why is that? Hashing won't increase the ...
5k 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 ...
267 views

### Can the AES encryption and decryption algorithms be described as a polynomial for a specific key?

AES is a block cipher that consists of non-linear and linear parts to provide the Shannon requirements of confusion and diffusion respectively. The linear parts can for sure be described as a ...
420 views

### Relation between attack and attack model for signatures

I would like to know: What is the relationship between an attack and an attack model. For example, let $\Pi$ be the Lamport signature scheme. This signature has its security based on any one-way ...
542 views

### Why are elliptic curves better than cyclic groups?

The set of points of an elliptic curve over a finite field is isomorphic to the direct product of two cyclic groups (i.e. $E(F_{p^n}) \cong Z_{s} \times Z_{t})$. What is the advantage of representing ...
1k views

### Tamper-proofing log files

Problem Overview I want to securely store log files so the contents are secret, and they can't be modified without detection. The files will be encrypted using authenticated encryption (AES in GCM ...
1k views

### BCrypt vs Key Stretching MD5

Ars technica posted an article about the latest in cyber warfare from the stuxnet crew. They key stretched MD5 by iterating it 10,000 times. It seems to be effective at handicapping HashCat's gpu ...
I'm testing an implementation of Bitcoin, which uses the curve Secp256k1 for ECDSA, and I want to see how it handles the point at infinity ($0$) if present in a signature. For example, r could be the ...