# All Questions

2k views

### How can I break a Vigenère cipher with partial plain text?

I have an exercise to do regarding Vigenère encryption. I've got the cipher text: WNZTNVIEEGTJYKRRWYUELWNZTNV and a partial plain text: ...
7k views

### What algorithm could/should be used to encrypt files for storage on untrusted servers?

I need an encryption algorithm that works fast on large files and doesn't increase the file size. It should use a key to encrypt/decrypt data. The files will be sent using REST and over HTTPS, but a ...
800 views

### When do we need composite order groups for bilinear maps and when prime order?

Why we need bilinear groups of composite order? What's the special security property of the composite order group in comparison with one of prime order? To put it in another way when do we need ...
2k views

### Why does CBC decryption with a wrong IV still give readable results?

While developing some code that uses the .NET AesManaged algorithm, I made some mistakes but was surprised at the results. My encryption was correct. I was generating a random IV block and writing ...
877 views

### Do Cryptographic Hashing Algorithms operate only on Integers?

Do all the Cryptographic hashing algorithms operate only on integers (32 bit or 64 bit)? Is there any operation performed on Floating Point Numbers as well? The reason I ask this is because I read ...
239 views

### Is a subset of a random set still random?

Suppose you have an infinite list of random bytes, and you select the first N bytes that correspond to printable ASCII characters. Is this list of N bytes still as secure (e.g. for the purpose of a ...
284 views

### Signing a GCM MAC

If I encrypt a message with AES-GCM, is it safe to use the MAC as the hash in a DSA/RSA signature? That is, if someone knows the AES key and nonce, will they be able to generate a different message ...
1k views

### Passwords with same SALT. What does this mean?

If the same SALT is used for many passwords on a Linux server, in what way is that a security risk? Does the mean, that a user (which can change his own password) can calculate other users passwords? ...
373 views

### How safe is it to derive MAC key from a hashed password?

Imagine I have a blob that I want to encrypt-then-MAC. Now, what I can realistically ask my users for (out of UX considerations) is just an encryption password. Naturally, I bcrypt original password ...
998 views

### Malleability of ElGamal and Hashed ElGamal

Question: Suppose A encrypts a number $x$ which indicates her bid on a contract, using ElGamal encryption. Say that the encryption of $x$ produces a ciphertext $c$. Explain how E can modify $c$ to ...
790 views

### How does the wider cryptographic community view non-abelian group based cryptography?

Is there perhaps some neural expository article on crypto systems based on non-abelian groups? I've gleaned that Anshel–Anshel–Goldfeld key exchange is the most well-known cryptographic algorithm ...
332 views

### Derived Shared Key vs Distinct Keys?

I've seen a lot of 2-party applications that derive a shared key from distinct keys created by each party. Why is this technique employed? Would it not be better to use those two distinct keys for ...
52 views

### Why is synthetic IV (SIV) mode considered deterministic authenticated encryption (DAE)?

I was just going over my (old) notes from Coursera's Cryptography I course, and I was puzzled by the description of SIV as providing deterministic authenticated encryption (DAE). The general SIV ...
128 views

### Why does choosing the first coprime e greater than half of φ(n) result in the same d (private exponent)

While reading on RSA's algorithm, I attempted a simplified implementation and noticed the following: When choosing the public exponent $e$, if the value chosen is the first coprime after $φ(n)/2$ ...
73 views

### Number of Sbox in a Cipher

Camellia has 4 SBOX and so does the TwoFish(key dependent 4 Sboxes). Where as AES uses only one. Would it have made AES more secure if AES had 4 or more SBOX too? Does using more Sbox with similar ...
433 views

### How to sign a large file for random-access reading?

I need to write an "Authoring" application which produces large files. These files must be signed so that the "Consuming" application knows that it was authored with a matching key. The consuming ...
55 views

### Motivation for the definition of statistical distance

Statistical distance is a widely used measure in cryptography for comparing two distributions. One can define various other measures for capturing the differences between two distributions, but why do ...
72 views

### RSA: select $e$ given $n$ and $\varphi(n)$

I have a question for a course I am doing. In an RSA question, it asks "Is it possible to select $e$ in such a way that it coincides with the corresponding private key $d$? If it is possible, provide ...
94 views

### Beavers Triple Vs BGW Multiplication on MPC

Typically MPC protocols that are secure against semi-honest adversaries recommend the use of the revised GMW multiplication protocol by Gennaro et al. This is not the case against Active adversaries ...
217 views

### What is this “finite field cryptography”?

See RFC 5931 § 2.2.1 which talks about "finite field cryptography" as opposed to elliptic curve cryptography and it looks like it is describing the Diffie-Hellman protocol. But Diffie-Hellman is not a ...
207 views

### Discrete logarithm problem is easy in a cyclic group of order a power of two

Let $G=\langle g\rangle$ be a cyclic group of order $2^{k}$ and let $h\in G$. I have read that it is easy to find $\log _{g} h$, but I haven't been able to figure out how. Do you know why this can be ...
67 views

### Can one extend the nonce of ChaCha/Salsa20 by XORing the extra bits with the key?

Can one extend the ChaCha and Salsa20 nonces by XORing the extra nonce bits with the key? My reasoning is as follows: the Rumba compression function allows attackers to supply any 48-byte input to ...
187 views

### Should I use a self-designed Block Cipher Mode of Operation?

We all know we should NOT roll our self-designed encryption algorithm, how about block cipher mode with a certificated cipher method like AES? Will a self-designed block cipher mode cause any flaws or ...
89 views

### ChaCha20 immune to timing attacks

What are the reasons because of which ChaCha20 is immune to timing attacks ? Also why is not AES immune to timing attacks?
281 views

### Ciphertext notation where the ciphertext consists of two parts

I've see in several places (here or there) the notation $c = (U, V)$ or $c =\langle U, V \rangle$, where $c$ is a ciphertext (to be transmitted). But as both $U$ and $V$ are "key-like". I can't find ...
190 views

### When all shares of a secret are given to adversary as a permuted matrix

Suppose we have a secret $\sigma$. The secret comes from a universe in which the elements are not necessarily distributed uniformly. We split $\sigma$ into $n$ shares $[\sigma_1,...,\sigma_n]$ (...
158 views

### Proof of non-membership on a merkle tree

Assume a user U and a server S. User uploads its data and wants later to perform an authenticity check. It also sends a merklee tree to the server. Lets say we would like the user to ask for a ...
254 views

### Why is 2048-bit RSA always paired with 320-bit ECC?

You may already have noticed that most smart cards ship with 2048-bit RSA support and 320-bit ECC over GF(p) support. You may have already asked yourself "why exactly 320-bit?". Now I remember having ...
184 views

### Block Cipher Without Key Schedule?

I'm designing a cryptography assignment for a college security course, and one of the problems is to perform a simple meet-in-the-middle attack on a 2-round, 2-key cipher. Since we want this to be a ...
252 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. ...
430 views

### Secure method for encrypting 32 byte private keys

I am using 32 byte EC private keys on the client side of a web application. These keys should be securely stored on a server database. The keys should be encrypted (AES) before being sent to the ...
652 views

### Encryption algorithm used in WPA/WPA2

I want to know how EXACTLY the WPA password gets encrypted I have been searching through and I was able to catch: The actual password is converted to some hash Salting is applied to the hash The ...
746 views

### ElGamal against chosen ciphertext attacks

In Hoffstein, Pipher, and Silverman's book An Introduction to Mathematical Cryptography, the authors make the following remark: An attack in which Eve has access to an oracle that decrypts ...
378 views

### Source for PKCS#11 Header Files

Is there a known authoritative source for the ANSI C header files for PKCS#11 Cryptoki? Specifically, I am having trouble locating pkcs11.h, pkcs11t.h, and pkcs11f.h for v2.30 and v2.40. Are there ...
343 views

### Brute-force attack given small search-space and hash prefix

Suppose we have a value $secret which is a random 56-bit (7-byte) string. Suppose an adversary wishes to discover$secret. The ...
314 views

### Inserting a backdoor into a cryptographic hash function

I'm curious as to how a backdoor can be built into a hash function. What might it take the form of? What's probability of getting one that can be backdoored in a way that can actually undermine its ...
433 views

### Reusing the random exponent for ElGamal encryption with different plaintexts

In the basic ElGamal encryption scheme, we encrypt a message $m$ as $(g^r, h^r m)$, where $g$ is the group generator and $h$ is the public key of the recipient. If the sender has another message $m'$ ...
430 views

### Signing Files vs. Signing File Hashes

What are the security pitfalls that may occur by signing a list of file hashes, versus signing individual files? In short, the security trade-offs between: ...
312 views

### Share encrypted files without giving master key

Imagine I have four files I want to encrypt. I have master key, and from that master key I derive four keys, one for each file: ...
319 views

### Encryption in which ciphertext is bigger than plaintext?

Is there an encryption which would produce a ciphertext longer than the plaintext? (please ignore block-chaining IV stuff, which would result in a data being generated from the plaintext). The point ...
158 views

### Why verify padding at all?

Whenever a ciphertext is decrypted using a block-cypher, we need to remove the padding. There are different ways to add padding, but they usually set the last byte of the last block to the number of ...
159 views

### What's the consequence of having a short IV? Is one mode better in that case?

I've read lots about null-length IVs being bad for most modes. In a scenario where passing a 128-bit IV along with each message isn't feasible, how would generating the IV from a smaller passed-along ...
847 views

### What characters are valid in PGP encrypted and signed messages?

What characters may be present in a PGP encrypted message or a PGP signature? For example, do encrypted messages only use the Roman alphabet + some numbers and symbols? Can the character set be ...
1k views

### Is there a standard way to use a nonce with HMAC?

Many protocols use HMAC on messages that include a nonce, but they don't seem to do it in a consistent way. For example, in OAuth the nonce is in the middle of an URL-encoded key-value string, like ...
607 views

### Update to “Cryptographic Right Answers”

I'm a big fan of Colin Percival's "Cryptographic Right Answers" post. This was written in 2009, which is a long time ago in Internet years. Is the advice still valid or, if not, can someone point me ...
179 views

### Understanding hash entropy

I have been told that one advantage of using a hash function is that it spreads entropy over all input bits. But it also seems to be true that a bad hash algorithm can make things less random. But how ...
229 views

### Is the strength of RSA over quadratic or other cyclotomic fields as strong as over the integers?

If we assume the strength of RSA is based on the difficulty of factoring (which I know we can't guarantee) and we compose the modulus of some other quadratic ring that is a unique factorization domain ...
524 views

### Why are collision attacks important when talking about MAC schemes?

I'm reading Ferguson, Schneier, and Kouno's Cryptography Engineering, and it has a section on MACs. It discusses different types of MACs, but it seems to claim that to acheive 128-bit level security, ...