# All Questions

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### McEliece information set decoding attack vulnerability

Wikipedia states that McEliece is open to "information set decoding attack". What is an "information set decoding attack" and how serious is the vulnerability? (is it just a matter of choosing proper ...
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### Perfect Forward Secrecy with Pre-shared Key

I've recently been looking at how to do perfect forward secrecy on a unidirectional connection (server can only push messages to client, client cannot respond). What I've come up with is the idea of ...
946 views

### Java's SecureRandom & plaintext attack?

Java's SecureRandom is meant to be cryptographically secure, and I know part of that means that the output should not be usable to predict further output. Though, ...
488 views

### Why use Needham-Schroeder if we have Diffie-Hellman?

If we want to establish secret symmetric key between two entities, why use Needham-Schroeder if we have Diffie-Hellman? With DH we don't need to have any trusted party, so what's the point of NS?
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### Can an RSA public key be generated without ever knowing the factors? [duplicate]

Context: http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/12/a-few-more-notes-on-nsa-random-number.html Assume I wanted to use RSA as the basis for a hash function or DRBG. Also assume that my construct ...
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### 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 ...
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### Why use a timestamp and how can someone know it's the correct one?

Let's say A wants to send a message, so everyone who gets the message, can be assured that it's from A. A then sends a message ...
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### Why does CBC-MAC need prefix-free inputs to be a good PRF?

In the FFX spec, there is a note about using CMAC as the round function. Security notes. The round function F is constructed in such a way that the set of inputs on which the CBC-MAC is ...
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### How to Distribute the Shares using Secret Sharing for arbitrary Monotone Access Structures

Consider 4 people, $A$,$B$,$C$,$D$, & a secret $s\in\{0,1\}^k$. Construct a scheme which enables the following subsets of people to retrieve the secret $\{A,B\}$, $\{A,C\}$, $\{B,C,D\}$. I know ...
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### Decrypting without using the private key

Let $g$ be a generator of a multiplicative group $G$ of order $q$, $x$ be a private key, and $h=g^x$ be a public key of an exponential ElGamal cryptosystem. Given a ciphertext $c$ produced as the ...
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### some of my confusions about DDH assumption

The wiki defines the decisional Diffie–Hellman assumption as follows: Decisional Diffie–Hellman assumption Consider a (multiplicative) cyclic group $G$ of order $q$, and with generator $g$. The DDH ...
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### Can padding length, and thus plaintext length, be considered public information when using aes-cbc?

Right now I'm using a simple padding system that takes the plaintext, hashes it with SHA512, and appends $x$ bytes of the hash as padding where $x$ is the delta between the plaintext and nearest ...
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### Swapping Key and IV in AES? Safe?

I have an application where I want to be able to send an encrypted file, and then mete out "keys" that allow the receipient to decrypt the file from a certain point to the end of the file. Actually, ...
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### Is it possible to insert a key derivation function when using EAX?

I am currently investigating use of EAX mode for a dedicated application and following useful clarifications received from my previous post , to consider according to my applicable input security ...
720 views

### Winternitz One-Time Signature

I am reading the page 38 in this "Post Quantum Cryptography" book (Equations 8 and 9). My question is, why to compute the verification key $Y$, $f$ is applied $2^w-1$ times? Are there any security ...
428 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 ...
184 views

### Does EAX use the same keys for encryption and authentication?

I am actually checking use of EAX AEAD mode, and following EAX spec review (scheme definition for my part), my question is: what about the derivation of the authentication and encryption keys? In the ...
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I'm playing around with an application for secure email-like communication and I want to perform length hiding padding on the plaintext messages so they always have a consistent size before encrypting ...
83 views

### “proof of access” schemes

What is the state of the art way when implementing a scheme challenging a party to prove they have access to certain data? What I'm looking for something along the lines of Give them ...
524 views

### Alternatives to HMAC + CBC?

I'm looking at using HMAC + CBC. The combination looks like this: ciphertext = AES256(text, k1) data = HMAC-SHA256(iv | ciphertext, k2) | iv | ciphertext Where: ...
750 views

### Recommended way of adding a pepper/secret key to password before hashing?

There have been several questions regarding password hashing here and on Security.SE. A "pepper" is sometimes mentioned – an application-specific secret key. The canonical answer on password hashing ...
389 views

### Is it possible to determine the group order by knowing the “public” and “private” key exponents in an RSA group?

I have an RSA group with modulus $n = p \cdot q$, two safe primes $p=2p'+1$ and $q=2q'+1$ and the "public" and "private" key exponents $d$ and $e$. $\phi(n) = 4p'q'$ is the order of the RSA group. If ...
536 views

### Is there a way to use Shamir Secret Sharing with updatable data?

I want to divide a system that maintains these properties, based on Shamir's Secret Sharing: A secret key is split up to N pieces, where T of them are enough to reconstruct the key. The original key ...
2k views

### What data is saved in RSA private key?

What data is saved in RSA private key in openssl? How to view it? Wikpedia says these variables are saved.
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### Visualization of cryptography

I think CrypTool is great software. And what I find most useful in it is visualization of algorithms such as Caesar, Vigenere, AES, DES. And my question is: does anyone know other tools which are ...
221 views

### Future-Proof Versioning and Validation

I am working on a library (using standard primitives: AES256 CTR; HMAC with SHA256; PBKDF2 with SHA256, 128 bit salt, and 10000 rounds) to encrypt and decrypt data, given a password. The encrypted ...
491 views

### Why are protocols often proven secure under the random oracle model instead of a hash assumption?

Is this true that whenever you design a protocol using a hash function, you must prove its security under the random oracle? I mean, is it possible to devise a protocol $P$ using a function $H$, and ...
4k views

### Why, or when, to use an Initialization Vector?

i'm trying to figure out when an Intialization Vector (IV) should be used. There are anecdotal reports that WEP was broken because of weak IV's. It's also claimed that if two pieces of plaintext are ...
195 views

### What authentication techniques can be used by QKD Systems?

As it is well known that QKD systems are prone to simple MITM attacks… what authentication techniques are being used in QKD to prevent those attacks in practice?
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### Dimension of Encryption of a linearly dependent set of plaintexts

Suppose I have an encryption scheme of the form $E(P)=C$ where $P$ is the plaintext and belongs in $\{0,1\}^N$, $C$ the ciphertext which belongs to $\{0,1\}^M$ and the encryption is performed under ...
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### How does a key wrapping like RFC 3394 secure my cryptographic keys?

So I'm messing around in the BouncyCastle library with the RFC 3394 AES Key Wrap engine and I'm trying to understand the benefit of it. The problem I'm running into is how to store keys securely on a ...
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### Any stream cipher with avalanche effect?

As far as I know, all stream ciphers work by generating a stream of pseudo random bytes, and XOR it with the plain text to get the cipher text. It has the property that one bit change in the cipher ...
101 views

### Security of encrypting many short values with AES in GCM mode

We intend to encrypt certain values in a database which holds personal information such as addresses so as to prevent data leakage should the database be compromised. The intention is that each field ...
103 views

### Understanding ransomware – What makes plain-text-attacks or brute-forcing so hard?

Say I have four files. Two are completely unencrypted, while the other two are the exact same files other than that they have been encrypted with (apparently) the same public key (via a ransomware ...