# All Questions

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### Does “use of SHA-256 in cryptography” imply use of SHA-256 both in HMAC and DH key exchange, assuming these are the only uses of hash in system? [closed]

I am beginner to Cryptography. And recently I came across the requirement like "use of SHA-256 in cryptography". Does "use of SHA-256 in cryptography" imply use of SHA-256 both in HMAC and DH key ...
201 views

### Is it overkill to run a key generated by OpenSSL through pbkdf2?

I'm generating a key & iv with OpenSSL via: ...
104 views

### Weil pairing implementation - low level programming language

I'm just started to studying elliptic curve cryptosystems. My one month-goal is to write a simple signature system based on the Weil-pairing. Some parts of it can be written without deeper ...
296 views

### why inverse in diffie-hellman protocol will not give same value?

Security of diffie hellman protocol is $K=g^{ab}$.if sender want to calculate value of $b$(given $a$) he can do $g^{{{ab}^b}^{-1}}$(where K=$g^{ab}$) which will give $g^{a}$ as we are cancelling value ...
91 views

### Will non-ECC algorithms like RSA eventually become too inefficient?

The strength of symmetric and asymmetric encryption schemes scales with the key length, but there is a difference between symmetric algorithms like AES and asymmetric algorithms like RSA. For ...
467 views

### Certificateless cryptography

While reading "Certificateless Public Key Cryptography" by Author Sattam S. Al-Riyami and Kenneth G. Paterson, they have considered generation of private keys by a Key Generation Center (KGC). If the ...
86 views

### Is MITM possible after key exchange phase done successfully in RSA?

Is MITM attack theoretically possible after public/private key pair exchange is done successfully. Say Alice and Bob have genuine public keys of each other. Is MITM possible further during ...
93 views

### Which hardware-accelerated AES-GCM implementations support encryption in-place? [closed]

By encrypt in place I mean the following. Suppose I have an input plaintext of length L and I have also allocated an extra E bytes at the start and/or end of the buffer, with E << L. So the ...
305 views

### How can I implement the elliptic curve MOV attack myself?

I understand and have implemented elliptic curve signatures in Python without the use of libraries like Sage, and would like to implement the MOV attack against certain weak types of elliptic curves. ...
2k views

### Zero Knowledge Password Proof

I'm working on implementing a cryptographic system and I'm trying to understand the Zero Knowledge Password Proof concept. So here's some background: To generate a secret key I am: Doing an ECDH ...
124 views

### Tweakable encryption algorithms vs Key wrapping

I have read many articles about Key wrapping and tweakable cipher modes. However, I don't understand the main difference between them? What you recommend for Key storage and Key Archive.
67 views

### Secure Broadcast Channel

I've read a paper that says that one of the "assumptions" that it makes is secure broadcast. Why is this an assumption? Can't a broadcast channel be built with simple primitives--i.e. encrypt and sign ...
234 views

### Hashing fundamentals

I have some ideas floating around my head for exploring hashing functions, but I want to make sure what I think I know is actually true, before basing a house of cards on it :) Let’s start with some ...
73 views

### SHA-256 Wrong registers

I have a problem with my sha256 java implementation. The registers (a…h) are correct until j=24; ...
284 views

### What key exchange protocols give Forward-Secrecy resisting future progress?

I (wrongly) understood what I've been told as meaning DHE in TLS, PFS in IPSec do not provide Forward-Secrecy; and I'm told that common forward-secure key exchange protocols are restricted to ...
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### Random numbers for Master Key and Key_block

Exploration through RFCs concludes that random numbers used in the creation of Master Key and Key Block(Key material for Encryption Key and Mac Secret) are from ServerHello.random and ...
154 views

### Unpredictability vs randomness

I'm experimenting with creating an entropy source for an environment where I have no hardware available and the language is very high level (executed in a virtual machine). I know it's not a good idea ...
178 views

### Fast modular reduction

I am looking at ways to speed up modular reduction for the polynomial $$2^{256}-2^{32}-2^9-2^8-2^7-2^6-2^4-1$$ I have read the paper "Generalized Mersenne numbers" by J.A. Solinas, but it does not ...
187 views

### Entropy of Androids motion-sensor data

My app on Android uses the built-in motion sensors to collect seed-data for the PRNG (java.security.SecureRandom) that is later to be used for key-generation. The user is told to shake the device so ...
593 views

### Is Dropbox's hashing method cryptographically secure?

Dropbox uses CRC32 and md5 to create a checksum of each 4 mb "block" as part of the their compression/file system. I suspect that Dropbox uses an additional cryptographic hash to check if there's a ...
107 views

### Prime factors of non-random keys

I have been working on a challenge i found on the internet. It is as follows: You've stumbled onto a significant vulnerability in a commonly used cryptographic library. It turns out that the ...
106 views

### Is it possible to calculate the 'skeleton key' for DUAL_EC_DRBG? What would it take?

According to Bruce Schneier the constants used in the spec of DUAL_EC_DRBG may be related to a secret set of numbers, that could function as a master key for ...
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### Convincing “someone” on the (in)validity of DH tuple without revealing $u,v$

Is there a way of convincing someone on (in)validity of Diffie Hellman tuple $<g, g^u, g^v, g^{w}>$ without giving away $u,v$. or at least solve the Decisional Diffie Hellman Problem without ...
2k views

### Why is H(k||x) not a secure MAC construction?

If H(m) is a secure hash function, can't we implement a MAC using H(k||m)? However, it seems the more widely used MACs, such as NMAC and HMAC (both originally defined in Keying hash functions for ...
100 views

### Is script execution time a decent source of pseudorandom number generation?

This is for a PHP script for password generation. Naturally there are other things being calculated before the password is generated. But I figure the time it takes for the script to initialize and ...
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### Why don't we use H(m||k) as a MAC? [duplicate]

HMAC seems a bit complicated. Why can't we use $H(m||k)$ as a MAC? Unlike $H(k||m)$, length extension attacks won't work. Is there some other obvious attack?
808 views

### NTRU crypto from unseen.is; myth busting help

I am always on the look out for privacy enhancing technologies. I stumbled upon the service from unseen.is. I had a look at their site (specifically here) and even though I lack knowledge there are a ...
125 views

### Can I use asymmetric encryption for more powerful write-protection?

I have a game that I am developing which uses a locally-stored internal database. It does not matter to me whether a user can read the file (which, to me, means I don't need a symmetric cipher), but I ...
227 views

### Why does CTR mode XOR the plaintext into the output of the block cipher rather than XORing the plaintext into the input of the block cipher?

As I understand it, CTR mode essentially turns a block cipher into a stream cipher like so: ...
186 views

### Is it meaningful to consider the leakage of master key of KGC?

In the Identity-based cryptography, the user's private key in the systems is delivered by the key generation center(KGC). My question is : Is it meaningful to consider the leakage of master key of ...
286 views

### Questions about OAEP for RSA

I have two questions about OAEP for RSA. How are the number of bits to pad with 0 chosen? For example, if I'm sending a 255 byte message with RSA-2048 I have 8 unused bits (1 byte). Should I split ...
1k views

### OpenSSL PBKDF2 documentation

I'm using OpenSSL 0.9.8 on OSX Maverick, and I want to use a PBKDF but I can't find any doc/man about it on OpenSSL's website. I'm working on QCA, an OpenSSL wrapper for Qt, and when I arrived there ...
710 views

### How does TLS generate the shared secret?

From many readings, I got to know that TLS generates master shared secrets using pre-master keys and uses the DH algorithm to generate the shared secret/Master secret. What values during the hello ...
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### Machine Learning with Encryption [duplicate]

Machine Learning is sometimes associated with cryptography. Many of such cross field studies have been majorly done in use of machine learning for cryptanalysis/decryption. I am interested in knowing ...
158 views

### Frequency of letters change by the length of the texts?

In terms of the frequency of letters, how is it possible to have different frequent letters when the length of the text I'm analyzing is shorter? At the moment, I'm comparing the frequencies of a ...
215 views

### Check the validity of a rsa key pair with only the public key? [duplicate]

I am currently developing a messaging application that uses rsa end to end encryption. The client generates permanent rsa keys, and sends the public key to my server for account management. As it ...
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### If $G'(s)=G(s0^{|s|})$ and $G$ is a PRNG, is $G'$ necessarily a PRNG? [closed]

I argue it is because there should be no more correlation between the outputs $G(s0^{|s|})$ than between the outputs $G(s)$. Thus we can say the $G'(s)$ is a PRNG that satisfies $|G'(s)| \geq 4|s|$. ...
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### Which data to share in CTR mode?

Suppose I've got two clients $A$ and $B$. Client $A$ encrypts data in CTR (Counter) mode to get a ciphertext. What information will client $B$ have to receive from $A$ to decrypt the ciphertext? Just ...
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### Need Help Reversing my Encryption Algorithm [closed]

So I wrote a simple encryption algorithm (Not very secure, just a starting point. I don't want criticism on it.) and I have been having trouble finding a way to decrypt the text. The algorithm is here ...
120 views

### File Encryption (EFS method)

I'm implementing (for learning purposes) a file encryptor, which uses the following method (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encrypting_File_System). I have 3 kind of keys: RSA public/private, AES ...
169 views

### Derive both MAC and AES keys from same PBKDF2?

When doing password-based encryption, is it OK to create one instance of PBKDF2 from the password, and then use it to create both the AES key and the MAC key? (Or should a new instance of PBKDF2 be ...
7k views

### Where i can find an AES implementation in python?

Where i can find a "reviewed" version of AES implementation in python. Not an API like PyCrypto whereby you can call AES algorithms in a single line.
558 views

### Estimating random number entropy for input into 256 bit hash

Assuming a random number generation process outputs lots of numbers between 0-9. First I gathered up a bunch of the numbers, converted them to binary and created a bitmap. Not so random as you can ...
265 views

### Using RSA key pair for file encryption

I'm looking for a way to perform encrypted nightly backups of a server I administer, without storing the decryption key on the server. A form of PK encryption seems ideal for this, as I can store the ...
83 views

### IND-CPA Security

Given a key $K$ (the key is fixed) and a nonce $N$ (changes from one message to another) Using a secure Key derivation function (KDF) such as the ANSI-X9.63-KDF with SHA-1 option to derive a key for ...
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### Determine the iteration times using Pollard's rho Method for factoring

Let's say, we have a large number $n=181937053$ and $f(x)=x^2+1$. And also we know that $n=12391 \times 14683$. The problem is that ,using Pollard rho method, can we find the algorithm iteration ...
2k views

### How to calculate the time it'll take to crack RSA or DH?

Sometimes the easiest way to describe security of a type of cryptography is to say that "the time it takes to solve for an x-bit key would be y years". How would one go about doing such a calculation ...
712 views

### Why Elliptic curve cryptography are not popular in practice

RSA and ElGamal can be implemented using the technique of Elliptic curves. I am confused on why the it seems that Elliptic curves are not so popular in cryptographic applications since they provide ...
I stumbled upon this question in some textbook. Propose a variant of ElGamal signature scheme such that there is no need to calculate the inverse $k^{-1}$ as it is usually done using the EEA. ...