# All Questions

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### Why is this a fix to Bleichenbacher's attack?

Looking at the excellent explaination of the attack here: Can you explain Bleichenbacher's CCA attack on PKCS#1 v1.5? I have one additional question: It says that: ""To prevent this attack, SSL ...
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### Timelock puzzle improvment

I came across this question with this answer about a cryptographic timelock-puzzle that needs approximately 30 years to be solved. There is also an explanation with source code for that puzzle ...
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### The Inhomogeneous Short Integer Solution (ISIS) problem with a clue

The Inhomogeneous Short Integer Solution (ISIS) problem is as follows: given an integer $q$, a matrix $A \in \mathbb Z^{n\times m}_q$, a vector $b\in \mathbb Z^n_q$, and a real $\beta$, find an ...
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### WPA and WPS: connection method [closed]

Do clients use WPS every time when they connect to a WPS-enabled AP? Or maybe they do it just the first time and then they switch to a normal WPA/WPA2 key exchange? If the latter, it's possible for ...
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### Self verifying hash algorithm

For quite some time I've been thinking about the idea to construct a hashing algorithm that contains its own checksum value, and thereby can verify itself. With hashing algorithms like SHA1 and MD5 ...
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### Generic name for (?hash) functions of form $\{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}^{poly(n)}$

Consider a function $$f: \{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}^{poly(n)}$$ with the following properties: hard to invert, i.e. given $f(x)$, hard to find $x$ hard to find a collision, i.e given $f(x)$, ...
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### Inconsistent terminology for ciphers and algorithms

I've been baffled by all the different kinds of names which are given to cryptographic algorithms. There are block ciphers and stream ciphers (AES and RC4). There is symmetric and asymmetric ...
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### Attack on key exchange with authentication

Suppose the honest parties - Alice and Bob - exchange public key in person/via telephone so that attacker can only eavedrop on the line. Alice has hashed the public key using a collision resistance ...
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### Security of integrity protection with HMAC vs AEAD

I'd like to know how the security of the integrity protection compares between: HMAC-SHA-256 with an 32 byte tag or a truncated 16 byte tag AES-GCM with a 16 byte tag AES-CCM with a 16 byte tag or ...
42 views

Server A produces signed messages on request. You can tell server A what type of RSA padding to use in the signature (either RSASSA-PKCS1v1_5 or RSASSA-PSS). Either way, the message will be signed ...
155 views

### Blowfish ECB mode: Tools for known-plaintext attack?

I'm currently dealing with multiple blowfish-encrypted files that share the same key. All are encrypted using ECB mode judging from their appearance. I don't know what the key is but I know 64 byte ...
464 views

### What is the difference between uniformly and at random in crypto definitions?

Very often in the description and analysis of a cryptographic protocol there is a need for a an element $k$ that is sampled uniformly AND at random. Is there a redundancy in the definition with ...
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### FileVault AES-XTS decryption with cipher text that's missing a part

My mac was recently upgraded to OS X Yosemite and FileVault2 full disk encryption was turned on. Encryption finished, but things went horribly wrong and key parts of the disk are filled with all 0s ...
170 views

### When is a cipher considered broken?

We've all read how some people claim AES is broken because there was supposedly a way to get the plain text from a cipher text faster than brute-force. But is this the definition? Is a cipher broken ...
56 views

### How to compute accumulated values in bilinear map accumulators

How to compute $g^{1/(e_1+s)}$, where $g$ is the generator of group $\mathbb G$, and $e_1$ and $s$ are keys? I know only $s$ and $g^{e_1}$, not $e_1$. $\mathbb G$ has prime order for some prime $p$ ...
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### What is the difference between any secret sharing scheme and arithmetic secret sharing scheme

It looks like that only difference between two of them the variables. But it does not make sense for me and I could not find exact definition of arithmetic secret sharing scheme. I mean what exactly ...
1k views

### What is the difference between a hash and a permutation?

As defined by Wikipedia a hash function is [...] any algorithm or subroutine that maps large data sets of variable length to smaller data sets of a fixed length. For example, a person's name, ...
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### Why are modes of operation used, what attacks do they prevent?

I know you always need to use a mode of operation when using a block cipher, AES for example, and Wikipedia has a good explanation for what modes of operation are Now I know if i do not use a mode of ...
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### Is creating a own protocol safe or should TLS always be used?

The more I start to learn about cryptography the more I hear it is unsafe to 'create' your own cryptographic protocol. With this I mean combining cryptographic primitives like HMAC, AES and RSA ...
115 views

### Can the same random number be used in encryption and signing?

In several public key algorithms, the person running the algorithm must generate a random number (that's separate from the key). Can this random number be the same for an encryption and a signature? ...
16 views

### Reordering of multiple signed blocks

I would like to refer you to page 430 of the Handbook of Applied Crypto, where the authors said "... reordering of multiple signed blocks presents a security risk..." This statement was made in ...
34 views

### Is this discrete log generalization a well known cryptographic assumption?

Assume you have a finite group $\mathbb{G}$ and an integer $n$. Given $g_1,\dots,g_n,t$ chosen uniformly from $\mathbb{G}$, consider the problem of finding a vector $(a_1,\dots,a_n)\in \mathbb{Z}^n$ ...
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### 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 $m'$ ...
164 views

### Looking For Additively Homomorphic Encryption

I have a construction that requires as primitive an Additively Homomorphic Encryption scheme that does not rely on hidden group order, meaning I can't use Paillier. I now have two different ...
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### PRNG generation improved by shuffling and combinations

Does this method improve PRNG generation. Pseudo Code (to generate a 10,024 byte PRNG sequence) Init array to 0 - 255 until full. hash the passphrase to N unique seed values Shuffle the array ...
33 views

### Key length requirement in a simple XOR implementation

I don't have much previous experience at all with cryptography, this is pretty much the first time I've tried anything similar. I'm trying to implement an extremely simple XOR encryption system in ...
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### CTR HMAC SHA256 implementation

After trying to invent my own AES mode, I decided to just implement something that's known to work, namely CTR with HMAC SHA256. From what I understand, I can use the IV as a counter, and the IV ...
85 views

### How do SignRecover and VerifyRecover work?

In PKCS#11, there are the SignRecover and VerifyRecover methods, where the data can be recovered from the signature. How do these methods work? Can I implement signrecover and verifyrecover with ...
314 views

### RFC 6979 - Why not simply hash the message & the private key for deterministic ECDSA?

Why go through the trouble of using the HMAC_DRBG process, instead of simply hashing [message | private key] to calculate $k$ for deterministic ECDSA? If the ...
235 views

### Why is AES unbreakable?

Why is it said that AES is unbreakable? Brute force attacks would take years to crack it, so is it possible to crack it if the computational speed of machines increase in the following decade?
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### AES-128/192 safer than AES-256 in practice? [duplicate]

Related-key attacks can break AES-192 and AES-256 with complexities 2^176 and 2^99.5, respectively. Quote from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard It seems that more ...