# All Questions

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### Fingerprint RSA public key in PKCS1 format

I can't find anywhere details on how to fingerprint a public RSA key in PKCS1 format. There are a lot of examples on the internet on how to fingerprint an RSA public key in openssh format using ...
276 views

### Is there a difference between asking for a signature and asking for a decryption in challenge-response authentication?

Consider the following two authentication schemes. In both cases the server knows a public key of the client (for a signature system in the first and an encryption system in the second case). Scheme ...
768 views

### What Diffie-Hellman parameters should I use?

After reading this article, I started wondering how should I approach the problem of choosing p and g params in 1024-bit Diffie-Hellman key exchange. In my project, I am going to establish keys ...
29 views

### Understanding RSA [duplicate]

I'm reading RSA in Cryptography Course. There is portion of RSA that's confusing me. In Handbook of Applied Cryptography its written Represent the message $M$ as ...
129 views

### Can the round function $F$ in a Feistel Network be practically any non-invertible function?

This question might seem silly, but how true is the fact that the round function $F$ does not have to be invertible? I am curious to know this, because non-invertible functions can be very lossy, ...
235 views

### Encrypt large data with RSA through blocks in java

I'm working on a communication protocol where a client sends encrypted data to a server. What happens is that in some point, the client creates a symmetric key used to create data digests through the ...
107 views

### AES/DES question about determine a key

I have a question. If you receive a DES encrypted message for which you would NOT recognize the plaintext if it were decrypted, is there any way to potentially determine the key if all keys are ...
71 views

### What level of security is provided when a Feistel Cipher is used as a round function of another Feistel Cipher?

Recently, I was reading: Are there any specific requirements for the function F in a Feistel cipher?, and the answer posted mentions a Feistel Cipher named Turtle, which uses a four-round Feistal ...
44 views

### Explanation of vector in Visual Cryptography

I'm starting to study about visual cryptography, but I am stuck with the following problem. On paper "Visual Cryptography" by Moni Naor and Adi Shamir, on page 6. How to read/what is the meaning of ...
283 views

### How does Diffie–Hellman differ from elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman?

I didn't understand how ECDH actually works. Disclaimer: I know very little about elliptic curves. Here is how DH works: Alice and Bob agree on a prime number $P$ and a generator $G$. (They use one ...
124 views

### AES-256 mode with per-block-key being a SHA-256 of SHA-256 of secret key, random public salt and block number. What's amiss?

Please criticize the (homebrew?) mode described below; to point out a single major defect/uncertainty or the link to (the analysis of) an equivalent construction is quite enough. Assume the ...
94 views

### Changing encryption key without revealing the original key

Say that Alice encrypts a $\text{plaintext}$ with $\text{key}_{m}$ and gives the $\text{ciphertext}_m$ to Bob. Alice wants to send several gigabytes of $\text{plaintext}$ to Eve but she is on a mobile ...
72 views

### Does Mersenne Twister generate homogeneous numbers?

I have been assigned to generate 15000+ homogeneous and uniform random numbers for a work. I have been searching if Mersenne Twister generate homogeneous distribution of numbers but I don't find ...
55 views

### Design for file transfers to a new party

I'm pondering a problem of how to enable transfers of files from clients to people that does not yet have an application/account/keys yet. Here's my current thought for Alice wanting to send Bob ...
210 views

### AMD and RDRAND instruction

The latest AMD programmer manuals, dated June 2015, include the RDRAND instruction in the instruction set. For completeness, it lacks ...
55 views

### Detecting Software Changes - Verifying untampered code

This question assumes an environment devoid of any internet connections, the software in questions operates in a non-connected environment on a single machine. I have a piece of software that may be ...
116 views

### Fast forwarding hash functions

We know that a good hash function is a one way/trapdoor function. Easy to calculate one way, harder to work out a previous state. I was wondering if anyone knew a good hashing system that allowed ...
212 views

### Memory-hard proof-of-work: are they ASIC-resistant?

Is a memory-hard proof-of-work scheme necessarily resistant to speedups from custom ASICS? Background: Bitcoin uses a proof-of-work scheme based on SHA256 hashing. The scheme is compute-bound. ...
35 views

### Hiding the identity of a party within the Kerberos authentication scheme

In the Kerberos authentication protocol, as described here: would it be safer to replace step (1) with: $$A \rightarrow T : A, E_{K_A{_{T}}}(B, N_A)$$ so that a passive adversary does not know ...
104 views

### Can a billion elliptic curve keys be generated on a laptop in less than an hour?

I want my application to generate an EC key pair. The first four bytes of the sha256 hash of the public key should contain a known IP address. As hashes are one-way functions, I need to brute force ...
49 views

### How to detect changes in data while preserving confidentiality (under constraints)?

Suppose party $A$ has two pieces of data, $X$ and $Y$, either of which may change separately, or they may change together. Given the following constraints: $A$ knows its current $X$ and $Y$ but has ...
195 views

### Secure Key exchange using javacard applet

I am working on a javacard applet project where i need... Secure communication between two applets let say there is applet A and applet B. Let say both applet has their own RSA key pairs. Now I ...
1k views

### Does an encrypted random sequence conserve its “randomness”?

If you have a random uniform sequence of bits $A$ generated by a TRNG with good performance of randomness tests (eg Dieharder, NIST, Kolmogorov complexity, chi-square, etc) and perform an encryption ...
55 views

### State level “Weak Diffie-Hellman” working for SRP too?

I've read about the "Weak Diffie-Hellman" attack (paper, website), where a resourceful entity like a state can pre-compute values for known primes to aid solving the discrete logarithm problem for ...
108 views

### Solving Vigenére with unknown alphabet

I'm trying to decrypt a cipher that I suppose has been encrypted with Vigenére. However I came about the following thought: The cipher consists of characters from ...
40 views

### Proving the security of a one-way function with partially known input

Let's say we have a construction like in this question: We have a OWF $h(.)$, a secret salt TXT, and a counter starting at 1, and we compute ...
32 views

### Number of qubits and breaking hashes [duplicate]

Noting D-Wave's press release on a 1000 qubits quantum computer had me wondering... Does the number of qubits nonlinearly change the speed/rate at breaking a SHA256 hash? If someone makes a say ...
40 views

### Data Switching and Information Leakage

Hypothesis: Let $z,a$ be uniformly random elements of a field $\mathbb{F}_p$ where $p$ is a large prime number. Also, let $(-z)$ be additive inverse of $z$. I have a fixed secret value $x$. I mask ...
335 views

### Deciphering “easy” ciphers without hints

I've been keen on IT Security for a long time now and I've learned a lot about networking & security. However trying a "decryption challenge" I'm lacking what I think is basic ...
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### Why does TLS 1.2 use GCM with additional SHA hash? [duplicate]

I am studying the cipher suites provided by TLS 1.2 and found an interesting question. TLS 1.2 adopts GCM for encryption and SHA256 or SHA384 for hash (e.g. TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256). But, GCM ...
104 views

### Values of p and q when e = 3 (RSA)?

I am doing a paper on textbook RSA (this is for high school btw) and in my example I need two very large primes, but I want my $e = 3$. Is there a short way to calculate the values of $p$ and $q$ ...
289 views

### SHA256: Padding a 512 bits length message

I am currently implementing the SHA256 hash-algorithm for a "custom-built" embeded-device. Obviously I have a problem with message padding. The routine I wrote does not work with message whose size ...
190 views

### HMAC key storage for a web app?

If one is going to use an HMAC, I.E: http://php.net/manual/en/function.hash-hmac.php, where exactly are they storing the key? Without some sort of secure storage (i.e not in a local file or code), I ...
205 views

### Can a file encrypted with one tool be decrypted with different tool? [closed]

I'm new to cryptography and I'm trying implement a file encryption feature into a Python program but I'm running into a big issue...what is needed for someone else to decrypt the file?! Obviously, I ...
73 views

### Properly storing an E-mail Password

I'm creating a messaging application that will use an outlook account to send an email. However, I'm unsure about the proper steps to store the e-mail password on the user's computer. Suppose I had ...
242 views

### RSA Signature Verification Implementation on Cortex M0

I have to implement RSA Signature Verification procedure (RSA-2048) on a Cortex M0 based MCU. My budget is 15kB Flash and 2-4kB Flash RAM. Is it even possible to do RSA on a low end MCU based on ...
165 views

### Concrete example of Weil Pairing

I am trying to find a concrete example of the Weil Pairing. What I have done until now is that I took $E=(x-1)(x-2)(x-3)$ over $F_5$. I took $E[2]=\{\infty,(1,0),(2,0),(3,0)\}$. I know that there ...
87 views

### public/private key: is it possible to have master public/private key

This may be a very primitive question which might not be possible but I have this question to understand. Assume Yahoo provides a messenger where yahoo users can chat in secure way (end-end ...
137 views

### Adding dummy bytes to ciphertext

I was wondering if interleaving the resulting crypted data with dummy bytes placed at random positions but known in advance by the peers could improve security (no matter the algorithm and strength ...