# All Questions

384 views

### Generating an IV for ESP 3DES-CBC

I have an application written in C, running in Linux. It uses IPsec (ESP) (manually putting the IPSec packet together) to send certain packets. The algorithm used ...
192 views

### Does impersonating an SRP server give you enough information for an off-line dictionary attack?

In a comment to an answer I wrote to another question, CodesInChaos wrote that: "Problem with SRP is that an attacker who impersonates a server learns the password hash, enabling offline search." ...
215 views

### Parallel-resistant proof-of-work scheme?

I am looking for a proof-of-work scheme which cannot be effectively parallelized. For example, in hashcash (and by extension bitcoin) you have some collision-resistant hash function $f()$, a target ...
233 views

### Quantum resistance of Lamport signatures

The Lamport-Diffie signature scheme is said to be quantum-resistant. Why is that? What would a quantum attempt to attack this signature scheme look like, and how does it fail?
451 views

### Formal definition of (perfect) forward security/secrecy

In recent weeks the concept of (perfect) forward security/secrecy has been mentioned a lot, primarily in the context of the shocking revelations about NSA eavesdropping. As far as I'm aware, this ...
636 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 ...
298 views

### Is it possible to anonymize web traffic so that the IP Address cannot be determined while still being able to determine distinct IPs?

I'd like to find a way to anonymize IP addresses in web logs to ensure user privacy given the following requirements: If given an IP address, there is no way to look up which requests came from the ...
395 views

### What does “message schedule” mean in SHA-256?

I am trying to understand the sha-256 algorithm from FIPS 180-2. I understood the padding and parsing of the message string. However after that it states (page 15): For $i = 1$ to $N$: { ...
180 views

### Is this OTP scheme safe?

I have a message $m_1$ and I want to encrypt it by XORing it with two keys $k_1$ and $k_2$: $$c_1 = m_1 \oplus k_1 \oplus k_2$$ So far so good. Now I was wondering if I could create a "fake" result ...
217 views

### In ECDSA, how many field operations are used for signature verification?

I am wondering about the computational cost of ECDSA signature verification, in term of multiplications in the base field; and, as an aside, in term of (much cheaper) additions. To make things ...
441 views

### Adding and multiplication in jacobian coordinates

How can I derive formulas for adding 2 points and multiplication by a scalar in Jacobian coordinates $(x,y) = (\frac{X}{Z^2},\frac{Y}{Z^3})$ over an elliptic curve?
148 views

### implementing long term archive encryption

Let's say I want to create private archives for the long term (e.g. more than 30 ). The archives' sizes could be anywhere from 1 GB to 30 GB. As far as I understand I could go down two ways: The ...
245 views

### Addition with Shamir secret sharing

When performing Shamir secret sharing I'm trying to find $z_i$, such that $z = x + y$. Where $n = 6$ and $t = 3$. I believe this would be the correct solution (correct me if I'm wrong): Each party ...
877 views

### Triple-DES Brute Force

Shannon's paper states: A system is pure if all keys are equally likely and if for any three transformations, $T_i$, $T_j$, $T_k$ in the set, the product $T_iT_j^{-1}T_k$ is also a ...
404 views

### What is the best way to store sensitive information on the client?

I am very inexperienced with cryptography and would like some advice on how to store some sensitive information on client machines. I have some information stored in a central database on my server. ...
155 views

### Chosen ciphertext insecurity in an ElGamal variant

I'm trying to prove something and if I can show that there is a simple way to calculate $(g^a \bmod p)^k$ if I know both $g^k \bmod p$ and $g^a \bmod p$, then (I think) it will help me prove it, but ...
248 views

### DSA signatures with related k and unknown payloads

Suppose that we are given DSA parameters $p$, $q$, $g$, a public key $y = g^x$, and two signatures $(r_1,s_1)$ and $(r_2,s_2)$. We are told that $(r_1,s_1)$ and $(r_2,s_2)$ were produced by related ...
326 views

### Understanding a Blowfish cryptanalysis

I'm reading a cryptanalysis on Blowfish, and I've come across something that I don't quite get. Let's denote $$\delta = a \oplus a'$$ where a and a' are bytes that cause a collision in some S-box ...
223 views

### Anonymity in end-to-end encryption

Considering a scenario of anonymous data transfer between seller and buyer using proxies. If we consider that there are three proxies that are being selected by the buyer to obtain data from different ...
357 views

### Understanding Feldman's VSS with a simple example

I'm trying to understand Feldman's VSS Scheme. The basic idea of that scheme is that one uses Shamir secret sharing to share a secret and commitments of the coefficients of the polynomial to allow the ...
297 views

### While generating a random Elliptic curve what are the conditions i have to considerd?

I want to generate a random elliptic curve over a prime field. What are the conditions I should satisfy? For the NIST recommended standard ECC-224 bit curve with prime $p=2^{224}-2^{96}+1$, a ...
74 views

How does padding in PMAC work? I have been told two stories: Firstly, I have been told that it works similar to CMAC padding, and secondly, I have been told that it does not need padding. I find the ...
282 views

### CPA Secure Chosen plaintext scheme

The example for IND-CPA secure schemes given is generally: for a random r, Enc_k(m) =(r|| E_k(r) XOR m) where E is a PRF But does the role of r and k really matter--i.e. isn't this equally ...
357 views

### Can ElGamal encryption and ElGamal signatures be used together sharing the same key-pairs?

I'm working on a encryption system where each party can store exactly a single ElGamal private key in a device. This is a hardware limit. The system must be expanded to support signatures and ...
200 views

### Is it OK to use a data-encryption key for key wrapping, too?

Our industry (area of cheap networked devices) has a standard that defines the usage of keys for both authentication and encryption using EAX mode of AES. This standard does not define key management, ...
2k views

### How do ciphers change plaintext into numeric digits for computing?

For example, in RSA, we use this for encryption: $ciphertext = (m^e \mod n)$ and for decryption. If our message is "hello world", then what number do we have to ...
282 views

### Recovering state of modified RC4 key scheduling algorithm

Consider this algorithm: ...
247 views

### Does ShaCrypt have the properties which make BCrypt slow on GPUs?

Sha256Crypt / Sha512Crypt are designed based on ideas of BCrypt but use SHA instead of Blowfish because of political requirements. The Sha*Crypt algorithms have the advantage that they are used in ...
319 views

### Order of hashing concatenation

A = hash("blue" + X); B = hash("pink" + X); If A and the literals are known and X is unknown, are there attacks on B aside from the attacks on directly on hash()? ...
226 views

### Are asymptotic lower bounds relevant to cryptography?

An asymptotic lower bound such as exponential-hardness is generally thought to imply that a problem is "inherently difficult". Encryption that is "inherently difficult" to break is thought to be ...
360 views

### secure multiparty computation for multiplication

Suppose there are $N$ parties $p_j$, each with a binary $b_j\in{\{0,1\}}$. The problem needs to compute the multiplication of number of ones times that of zeros, that is, ...
1k views

### Proof of security for RSA signatures

I am new to here, I was having some problems with a problem I am working on: "For each of the following variants of the definition of security for signatures, state whether textbook RSA is secure ...
1k views

### Demonstrating the insecurity of an RSA signature encoding scheme

I'm working on problem 12.4 from Katz-Lindell. The problem is as follows: Given a public encoding function $\newcommand{\enc}{\operatorname{enc}}\enc$ and a textbook RSA signature scheme where ...
653 views

### Generalizing the conversion of Diffie-Hellman to El Gamal

How can we generalize the conversion of Diffie-Hellman to El Gamal public-key encryption scheme? The goals is to be eventually able to show that any 2-round key-exchange protocol can be converted into ...
1k views

### ANSI X9.9 Cryptography Standards

I'm trying to create a ISO8583 Rev93 message. What is the standard way of generating MAC key in ANSI X9.9 DES-CBC encryption algorithm is used to encrypt the ...
700 views

### Using an RSA private key simultanously as an AES encryption key to generate random numbers?

Currently I'm implementing a PRNG for an embedded system. Using the RFC 4086 I've decided to use the X9.17 - to be more specific the successor X9.31- standard to implement my PRNG. X9.17 uses DES, but ...
89 views

### Why can't you just clone encrypted data and use it?

Let's take a contactless card for example (one for public transport lets say (i.e. MiCard)), the data is encrypted on the card and encrypted on the reader as far as I know. So how come somebody who ...
53 views

### Achieving 32-bit verification code with 16-bit CRC?

I am programming an embedded chip that has a hardware 16-bit CRC module. I have to protect some data bytes $d_0,d_1,...,d_{n-1}$ against corruption caused by sudden loss of power; a 32-bit CRC would ...
148 views

### Which multiplicatively homomorphic encryption scheme supports encryption of 0?

I want a multiplicatively homomorphic encryption scheme that supports encryption of 0 (e.g. Elgamal doesn't support). I also want the multiplication to be operated on the ciphertext of 0, i.e., if ...
144 views

### Can a secret message be securely transmitted within a MAC tag?

A sender wants to transmit an ultra secret code $M$ which could be either 'go', 'stop' or 'wait'. This could be any selection of code words really and adopted for any use such as transmitting short ...
50 views

### NIZK Proof of knowledge N of M discrete logarithms (threshold)

It is well known how to produce a NIZK that curvepoints $aG$ and $aP$ have the same discrete logarithm $a$ with respect to the curvepoints they are multiplied by. There is also a way to prove that a ...
188 views

### Efficient AES - Use of T-tables

I'm really in trouble! I'm trying to understand how the T-tables in AES encryption work. But I don't know if I get the point. What I understood is that they are used to reduce the whole computation of ...
65 views

### Can we use numbers as a pad in the Vernam cipher - why or why not?

I was playing with the Vernam cipher on some online converter. But when I tried to encrypt my message string with numbers, it remained unchanged. Moreover, it was ignoring numbers and was encrypting ...
160 views

### Asymmetric algorithm for one time signing of small cleartext

I want to generate a key pair such that the private key can be used once to sign a small message (1024 bytes) at some indeterminate point in the future and the public key can be used to verify that ...
157 views

### Repeatable crypto

Is there a safe way to do crypto that will always produce the same result for a given input? My use case is transferring deltas of huge files, to a backup server. The backup server has no knowledge ...
124 views

### Possible CPA or CCA attack when using AES-CBC mode under the following situation?

Both client and server know a shared key in advance. Both sides us EVP_BytesToKey() derive a pair of same key and same IV. Then, client and server start transferring data encrypted by AES-CBC mode ...
92 views

### Partial hash code protocol for security tokens providing signatures

I've read the following two sentences within a beta protocol specification, which references ISO/IEC 7816-8 for PSO:HASH which already contains notions of a "partial hash". The off-card entity is ...
81 views

### Convergent Encryption: integrity and authenticity

I have one question about convergent encryption. Suppose I use AES-256 in CBC mode. I need a 256 bits key and a 128 bits IV. If I use SHA-256 to hash one file, then I can use directly that hash as ...
I'm reading “Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Integers” by van Dijk et al. I wonder why $x_0$, which is a component of the public key, should be an odd number?