# All Questions

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### Deriving Minimum Description Length of Substitution Key

Given a plaintext: Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country because the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. and a substitution ciphertext: Mpe od yjr yo,r ...
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### Is OCB the state of the art in authenticated encryption modes of operation for block ciphers?

OCB mode seems to represent the state of the art in authenticated encryption modes, largely due to its speed – it is faster than GCM even when GCM has hardware support. Its only drawbacks seem ...
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### Huffman coding is a prefix code, proof [closed]

How would you prove that Huffman coding $C$ is a prefix code, i.e $$\forall x,y \in C,\ \forall z \in \lbrace 0,1\rbrace^*,\ x\not=y||z$$ Using induction according to the number of items to code? ...
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### How does order-preserving encryption work on string?

I have read “How does order-preserving encryption work?”. After that, I completed order-preserving encryption on integer data. Now, I have four questions in this subject: Is it possible to apply ...
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### How to reverse this hash function?

I have a function that takes an $m$ byte inputs $x_i$ and maps it a 32 byte outputs $y_j$. The hash function is defined as: $$y_j = \sum_{i=1}^{m} (x_i)^{i-1} \pmod {127}$$ The input is restricted ...
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### Are there any hash functions that use integers of arbitrary bit size (e.g., int63)?

More precisely, I am looking for hash functions where the internal state can be decomposed as a vector of integers of size 63. That is, machine integers where one of the bits is fixed and unusable.
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### Sigma protocol: witness hiding

I am working on an assignment and I am stuck with the last part of proving witness hiding for the protocol. I have previously proved it is witness indistinguishable, and it has q (primer number ...
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### Understanding Hash function notations

I am implementing a Certificateless Cryptography Algorithm by referencing the paper An Efficient Certificateless Encryption for Secure Data Sharing in Public Clouds. In this paper on page no. 4 during ...
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### Calculating characters from the sum of ASCII pairs

I have a series of messages (limited to only a-z and A-Z) that are encoded such that the sum is taken of every two ASCII values and concatenated. For instance, the message ...
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### How does Microsoft's BitLocker Recovery Code work?

I don't trust Microsoft BitLocker because it is closed source, which makes it so people can't audit it. But now I'm really interested in how its recovery code works. In my own knowledge, encrypted ...
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### Is there a key for AES-128, 256 etc, where cleartext equals ciphertext? [duplicate]

Is there a key for AES-128, 256 etc, where cleartext equals ciphertext? (regardless of modes like chaining or ctr-cbc)
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### Using AES-CTR to generate AES subkeys from a master key and nonce

Suppose I would like to encrypt some data using AES-GCM because it has hardware support on my processor and it is secure. Unfortunately, I don't like the 96-bit nonce size, because I want to randomly ...
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### Does “double RC4” exhibit the same weaknesses as standard RC4?

I know that RC4 is weak. However, I don't know if two RC4 streams XORed with each other can be attacked in the same way that one can, especially if $n$ bytes are dropped. Assume keys and IVs are ...
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### What is the strength and attack vectors of this simple scheme?

Let's say that Alice wants to communicate some secret value $S$ to Bob through a public channel in a way that other people don't know what the value was. To do this, Alice publishes that secret value ...
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### How common are non-RSA digital certificates?

Is there a statistic available that shows just how common are DSA or ECC certificates amongst webservers? I know that RSA-based certificates are the most common, however I'd like to know, if there is ...
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### Reducing the probability that a password will be guessed

In a file users' password hashes are stored. There are 2 approaches to reduce the probability that the password is guessed. Increase the size of the salt from 12 bits to 24 bits. Increase the length ...
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### Non-repudiation in classical cryptosystem

How can we modify classical cryptography system to provide non-repudiation? I want to ensure non-repudiation in symmetric key cryptography so that we can find out who is sender of a particular ...
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### Interpreting a set S subset of {1,2,3,…,N} to a N-bits String

If I have a set S which is a subset of {1, 2, . . ., N} and I want to interpret S as a N- bits string. Is it possible to do so? If possible then how?
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### Can we use more than one irreducible polynomial in AES?

I understand that the irr. poly is used to form the s-box (and inv. s-box), the key schedule and the mix columns. But could we use a different irr. poly for the mix columns and another for the key ...
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### Why is the permutation in AES (and other ciphers) not random?

If the permutation in AES (or other ciphers) were random, would it not be stronger against differential attacks? If this is so, then might we need fewer rounds for the same level of security?
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### Are there any holes in my stateless encryption protocol?

I want to create a reasonably secure protocol to allow a bunch of machines within a datacenter to securely communicate to one another. Specifically as a kind of tunnel. I want to avoid building up ...
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### A simple client/server authentication protocol

Some days ago I asked for a help to find and correct the problems of an authentication protocol. I closed the post because I was convinced I can correct it but, unfortunately I'm having some troubles. ...
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### Comparison of RSA and DRSA scheme using SageMath

I am trying to compare the encryption and decryption speed of the RSA and the DRSA scheme with same public key $(n, e)$ and private key $d$ (using SageMath). For $1024$ bits long $n$, I got the ...
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### What's the appeal of using ChaCha20 instead of AES?

I read about ChaCha20 being used in TLS by Google, SSH, and towards standardization in general. What's the appeal of using something other than AES, what with AES receiving dedicated CPU instructions ...
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### security of a block cipher mode of operation

Consider the following block cipher mode of operation: \begin{align} tag_0 &= mac\:key\\ plaintext_0' &= plaintext_0 \oplus iv\\ E(tag_0 | plaintext_0') = C_0 &= tag_1 | ciphertext_0\\ ...
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### Secret construction

Given set of random strings $w =\{s_1, s_2, s_3 ... s_n\}$ are there any algorithms to construct single master secret $S$ from them? Subsequently we should be able to deconstruct the $S$ back to ...
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### Does length prepending fix the key reuse problems with CBC and CBC-MAC?

As I hope everybody is well-aware, re-using the key for CBC-MAC and CBC is a really bad idea. Now, there's also the paradigm to prepend the message length to the CBC-MAC (as "associated data") to ...
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### Nonce encryption with Poly1305-Chacha20

I have seen that a couple of companies (like Google, Apple HomeKit) are adding "ChaCha20-Poly1305" as an encryption option. Poly1305 requires algorithm to encrypt the nonce. The Poly1305-AES ...
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### Calculate if a digital signature is valid

In the book An Introduction to Mathematical Cryptography, it mentions a section on digital signatures and a theoretical example. I am having difficulty understanding the book and I was wondering if ...
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### Large Volumes of Asymmetric Encryption

First of all, I apologize in advance if I use any incorrect terminology. I am just getting my feet wet when it comes to cryptography and there is a lot to learn. For the past 12 months we have been ...
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### Cryptography survey as an undergrad

Is cryptography so specialized that taking a survey class is a waste of time? I'm not the type of person who can do logs in my head or has a deep mathematical aptitude, but cryptography is certainly ...
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### Block cipher block and key sizes

Is there any point in making block size less than key size in block cipher? For example, Russian GOST symmetric cipher uses 256-bit keys to encrypt 64-bit blocks. That means there are many keys which ...