# All Questions

230 views

### Is it possible to ensure security with zero pre-shared information?

Is it possible to secure a communications channel against both passive (sniffing) and active (injecting / MitM) attackers without either legitimate party knowing any pre-shared information? I know ...
701 views

### RSA algorithm's license free or paid?

I checked RSA's patent application, which was registered in 1983. As patents don't last more than 20 years, it seems to me it should be free. But my friend said to use RSA I have to buy a license from ...
657 views

### How can I solve the discrete logarithm modulo 2q+1 if I can solve it in the subgroup of order q?

As part of my cryptography course I came across an exercise that neither me or my friends could figure out. The problem statement is as follows: Let $p$ be a large prime of the form $p = 2q + 1$ ...
362 views

### Does Identity-Based Encryption actually solve any problem?

Identity based encryption schemes [*] seem to have great potential in high-latency Delay-Tolerant and mobile, ad-hoc networks since they apparently seem to avoid the need for key negotiation and ...
163 views

### Proof of work scheme with one and only one correct answer

I need a problem that has one and only one solution, such that the solution is hard to find but easy to verify. I need to be able to generate the problem deterministically from a random seed. So ...
285 views

### LFSR dynamic mutation

In normal LFSR, the state is a function of the initial seed, taps positions and time, nothing else. I've seen a modification of LFSR that works like this: ...
1k views

### Efficient and stateless anti-forgery method

One use of an anti-forgery token is to prevent Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks. The attacker doesn't need to sniff the wire in order to carry out a CSRF attack. This attack relays on the ...
1k views

### ECC algorithm pollard's $\rho$ complexity

One of the methods to break a ECDLP is Pollard's rho algorithm. When ECDLP is defined over a finite field $F_p$, and given a relation $S=w.T$, where S and T are a member of $F_p$. Then ECDLP is to ...
172 views

### Does security under ROM imply exactly what?

I'm not sure I understand really the implications of proofs of security in the random oracle model. Does a proof of security in ROM translate to a reduction of security of the crypto-system to the ...
765 views

### How can I generate a one-time password?

Through my reading about the generation of one-time password (OTP) I found that there are many algorithms that generate OTP and they are either based on time such as TOTP or based on mathematical ...
805 views

### Can one group the SHA-256 outputs depending on partial inputs?

Is it possible to predict a hash key based on half key? Let's have some example: I have 100000000 hash results, and they are generated by either ...
3k views

### How to attack a general polyalphabetic cipher?

I am able to decrypt vigenere cipher text using the index of coincidence and chi test. However out of interested how do you go about attacking ciphertext that was encrypted using a mix alphabet ...
397 views

### Endless PRNG from PRNG with specific stretch?

Every definition of pseudorandom generator that I've seen says it takes n-bit strings and gives poly(n)-bit strings. Is there a proof that if there is such a pseudorandom generator then there is a ...
240 views

### How common are SEED certificates outside of Korea? When is support required?

I'm looking at the SEED algorithm and would like to know if this is still in common usage. Can anyone tell me when I would need to implement this standard, either as a client or a server?
60 views

### What is the recommended number of iterations for Argon2?

I've recompiled my operating system ("LionBSD" based on FreeBSD) to use Argon2i as the default password hashing algorithm in crypt/libcrypt. I'm wondering what the recommended number of iterations ...
41 views

### Key derivation with Curve25519 for data encryption

I'm new when it comes to cryptography so this question might be a little bit stupid: Can I derive a key with Curve25519 from a (let's say) root key and encrypt the file with a secret key algorithm? ...
88 views

### Is this a better involution S-Box for the Anubis cipher?

After swapping random indexes of trivial involution $S[x] = ¬x$, I found the following involution S-Box with a non-linearity of $98$ and a differential uniformity of $6$. Is there an upper limit to ...
93 views

### What is the major difference between FIPS 186-2 and FIPS 186-4?

Can anyone please tell me the major difference between FIPS 186-2 and FIPS 186-4? I know with FIPS 140-2 they want the DSS standard to be FIPS 186-4, but what difference does it make?
136 views

### differential cryptanalysis cipher for the final round

I have a problem to find the sub-key. The system is… For each round, we make the following stage: We add the round key $K_i$. Substitution : we have 8 blocks of 4 bits, and an S-box ...
61 views

### What is the branch number of this matrix?

We have the following matrix: $$\begin{pmatrix}0&1&1&1\\ 1&0&1&1\\ 1&1&0&1\\ 1&1&1&0\end{pmatrix}$$ What is the branch number? Is this a MDS marix?
95 views

### What is the private key in RSA?

I'm new to cryptography and I have a doubt: I read some pages a bit different definition for the RSA private key: In 1 - (n, d) In 2 - ...
113 views

### Is there any function that does not suffers birthday problem?

I am eager to know that if there is any function that does not suffer birthday problem and how to prove it formally that the function is not suffering the birthday problem.
126 views

### Integer factorization still hard with Hamming weight hypothesis?

Consider the following problem: Factorize a $n$-bit integer $c$ knowing that it is the product of two integers with known Hamming weight $h$. Is there a way to prove that this is still hard? I have ...
68 views

### How to implement 1-out-of-n OT from 1-out-of-2 OT?

How can I implement a 1-out-of-$n$ oblivious transfer protocol from 1-out-of-2 OT protocol which is resistant against passive corruption? Assume we can access 1-out-of-2 OT $n$ times.
145 views

### Encrypt-then-HMAC implementation - am I doing it right?

I want to implement authenticated encryption using C#. There is a dot net class called encryptAndAuthenticate, but it is only supported on windows 8 or later, and I need the code to also work on ...
103 views

### What problems with “random” data would cause this result from Ent?

I'm playing around with a novel kind of source of "random" data and Ent is currently giving me results like this: Entropy = 7.977080 bits per byte. Optimum compression would reduce the size of this ...
111 views

### Calculation of the avalanche effect coefficient

Given a strict avalanche criterion matrix/dependence matrix for a hash function,how do I calculate the avalanche coefficient for it. I want to calculate a single parameter(value) which represents the ...
107 views

### If we should not reuse primes in DH, shouldn't we not reuse ECDH elliptic curve properties?

An article How is NSA breaking so much crypto? describes NSA's methods for breaking encryption. If a client and server are speaking Diffie-Hellman, they first need to agree on a large prime number ...
48 views

### Could a strong round function be immune to slide attacks

An excerpt from the wikipedia article on slide attacks states: ...The only requirements for a slide attack to work on a cipher is that it can be broken down into multiple rounds of an identical F ...
96 views

### Exposed raw RSA private key operation

Assume that there is a smartcard or other hardware token that exposes the raw RSA private key operation (modular exponentiation, with or without CRT parameters). Is there any possibility that raw RSA ...
79 views

### Does a key derivation function always generate an even distribution of bits in the resulting key?

I am a student of crypto. During our study course, we went into the AES-128 algorithm. All the examples given used an initial key k, 128 bits and we only briefly touched on the key derivation of ...
167 views

### great discovery in the field of elliptic curves cryptography?

Prof. Adi Shamir says in The Cryptographers' Panel 2016: i think that NSA has made a great discovery in the field of elliptic curves cryptography and NSA wants to avoid the increased use and ...
77 views

### Can a list of hashes with property $X_{n+1} = \operatorname{SHA-256}(X_n)$ loop?

This is the situation: I have a list of hashes where each hash is always the SHA-256 of the one above it. If I keep going down the list it must at some point loop since there can only be $16^{64}$ ...
61 views

### Is there any more asymetric-time permutation than x^3 (mod p)?

I've been using "asymetric-time bijective functions (or permutations)" for several practical uses. I've applied them to solve problems in software-attestation and proof of unique blockchain storage. ...
149 views

### What's the issue with Apple's backdoor?

I was reading Apple's public letter here regarding the "backdoor" that they have been asked to create. I'm very unclear exactly what the issue is. There was no backdoor in the encryption algorithm ...
119 views

### Common Modulus Attack not reproducible

I want to calculate a simple example of the RSA common modulus attack. However, the result is not correct and I do not find my mistake. p=$29, q=37, n=p*q = 1073, \phi(n) = 1008, e1 = 5, e2 = 11$ ...
74 views

For a personal project, I'm building a password manager, based off the project in this syllabus from Stanford http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/cs255/hw_and_proj/proj1.pdf Since I don't exactly have ...
68 views

### What algorithm to use to rotate values in a predefined manner and be able to decrypt them back to the original?

What is the best practice to accomplish this? For example, let's have an initial value abc123456 and a seed secret_hash. I want ...
100 views

### Contrasting Key Rotation Requirements : Asymmetric vs. Symmetric Ciphers

I'm trying to contrast key rotation requirements for asymmetric and symmetric ciphers. In the case of symmetric ciphers, we have the results such as the so called "CBC Theorem" (stated on pg. 24 of ...
73 views

### Compromise between HMAC and Digital Signature, by encrypting and sending secret key?

For achieving stateless authentication tokens (like JWT), is there a compromise between the performance of HMAC, and public key distribution of Digital Signature? Scenario: Sender is a centralized ...
130 views

### Why does HKDF use HMAC(salt, key) instead of HMAC(key, salt)?

I've been looking over the HKDF specs (RFC 5869), and something I noticed is that in the key and salt are reversed: ...
99 views

### Are EC public/private keys significantly weakened by having a known byte?

I would like to use different EC keys for different purposes in an app, and I would like to easily see the purpose for which particular key (pair) was generated. With ~65K attempts, I can generate a ...
87 views

### How were semagrams encrypted in the pre-digital era?

Historically messages in languages that use alphabets have been encrypted manually according to some kind of algorithm (e.g. mono- and poly-alphabetic ciphers). But how wew messages encrypted in a ...
176 views

### Is there a way to prove equality of plaintext that was encrypted using different public keys?

Imagine if Alice encrypts message to Bob (using public key $P_{bob}$) and then Bob encrypts the same message to Carol (using $P_{carol}$). Is there a way for Bob to prove that: $P_{carol}$ was ...
58 views

### State level “Weak Diffie-Hellman” working for SRP too?

I've read about the "Weak Diffie-Hellman" attack (paper, website), where a resourceful entity like a state can pre-compute values for known primes to aid solving the discrete logarithm problem for ...
108 views

### Effect of message length on collision attacks

I know that message collisions are supposed to be hard to calculate for a good cryptographic hash. Given 1k worth of data, it's hard to find another 1k worth of data that collides with the same hash. ...
202 views

### How have MD5 constants been determined?

For instance, the per round shift amounts, ...
151 views

### Safe curves in Weierstrass form?

I would like to implement a protocol using elliptic curves. I'm thinking of using MIRACL so using curves in their Weierstrass form is preferable as it they are supported by this framework. I don't ...
We've constructed a new private RSA key from two known private RSA keys $Priv_1$ and $Priv_2$ as follows: $$p = next\underline{}prime\left(\frac{Priv_1(p) + Priv_2(p)}{2}\right)$$ and q = next\...