# All Questions

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### Can I make a PRNG that is secure even when state can be modified by user?

I am interested in making a PRNG which, after being initially seeded, can accept and incorporate client data as the only ongoing source of "entropy". It is not directly for a cryptographic purpose, ...
236 views

### DES with actual 7 byte key

Do we have any library or any mechanism where we can use true 7 byte key for DES instead of 8 byte key. I need it for keys analysis in DES and 8 byte key requirement for associated library is creating ...
135 views

### “Fine grain Cross-VM Attacks on Xen and VMware are possible” and OpenSSL 0.9.7

Here's a paper that just made its way into Cryptology ePrint Archive: Fine grain Cross-VM Attacks on Xen and VMware are possible!. Its a good survey of past attacks and presents a couple of new ...
74 views

### Do Chosen-Chiphertext attacks only apply to public-key cryptosystems?

Do Chosen-Chiphertext attacks (CCA-1/2) only apply to public-key Cryptosystem?
204 views

### TLS Key Block calculation - What is a PRF?

In Section 6.3 of the RFC for TLS 1.2, it is written that the key_block is derived from the following formula: ...
212 views

### Private RSA key for HMAC key

I am creating software tokens for future request authentication, and I want to use an HMAC for the token to make them tamper-resistant. To ensure I can check the HMAC later I need a secret, persistent ...
149 views

### Is there a point using GCM block chiper with Authenticated DH?

I'm delivering shared secret with DH exchange, using a static key for signing and an ephemeral for session, so is there a point using GCM for encrypting the data, or is a simple CBC/CTR block cipher ...
209 views

### Why the need to hash before signing small data?

I’ve got two questions: I’m doing the following: Data : uuid + int + nonce Signature: ECDSA(sha256(Data) ) To verify the signature: ...
195 views

### Is there a time-space tradeoff attack for breaking symmetrical cryptos?

Is there any known techniques for using time-space tradeoff for speeding up symmetrical crypto breaking? Kind of like rainbow tables speed up breaking hashes by using huge precomputed tables. Is ...
365 views

### Is it true that for RSA with no padding, the length of data must be equal to the length of key?

The question pertains not in terms of security but computing operational functionality, as it how the computation is done. Is it true that for RSA with no padding, the length of data must be equal to ...
129 views

### Explanations for the complexity values for second preimage attack on GOST?

I've been reading the article "A (second) preimage attack on the GOST hash function" by F. Mendel et al (link) and I'm having some difficulty to grasp some of the values of complexities/probabilities ...
88 views

### Proving a decision was randomly made [duplicate]

Alice and Bob want to agree on a bit $0$ or $1$. Both know it would be fair to pick that at random, but there's no way they could meet to throw a dice and no third party they could trust. Are there ...
124 views

### Verifying multiplicative inverse on a prime field in NIST's ECDSA_Prime.pdf

I am trying to learn about the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) by verifying the results in some example calculations. I found a PDF of example ECDSA calculations from NIST here: ...
99 views

### Changing a bit Changes Hash

I am very curious on the fact that SHA, MD5 and all related Hash Functions change the output even by changing one bit in input Message. Why is that?
104 views

### How can I show that the DDH problem is self-reducible?

I have trouble to understand how I can show that the Decisional Diffie-Hellman problem (DDH) is self-reducible. I found this as a description of a random self-reducible problem. ...
147 views

### Do any one-key-of-many cryptographic schemes exist?

I'm pretty sure I understand how public/private key cryptography works. Anybody can encrypt a message using a well-known public key, but only the person who holds the private key can decrypt it. My ...
150 views

### Given p and q of DSA how do you show they are prime?

I am given p = 4916335901 q = 88903 and am asked to show these are prime as well as q|(p-1) in DSA. I am unsure on how to ...
1k views

### How to calculate the maximum output size for data encrypted with a RSA Private Key?

I have an an encryption algorithm I am working with that looks like this: prv_key_enc(sha1_hash(data)) Where, the RSA parameters are: RSA/ECB/PKCS1Padding 1024 ...
273 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 ...
305 views

I know about PBKDF2, bcrypt, scrypt, etc. and while I'm not a crypt professional, I think I understand why are they better than just "hash(pass+salt)". But a colleague of mine surprised me with the ...
361 views

### How is LUKS dm-crypt secure if the key is stored with the encrypted data?

I've posted this question over at superuser, but haven't had any success at getting answers. That's why I've posted it here. Furthermore, I believe this is a more appropriate place for it as it is ...
169 views

### Is use of pre-shared key for sharing session key in symmetric key cryptography vulnerable to MITM?

Consider the following protocol: ...
99 views

### Pseudo random permutation for arbitrary size domains

Popular block ciphers like AES or Twofish are keyed pseudo random permutations on the domain $\{0,1,\dots,2^{k}-1\}$ with $k\in\{128,192,256\}$ or similar. I'm interested in pseudo random ...
170 views

### Is this approach to generating a “random” number from a sha512 hash effective?

I'm looking to run a small raffle but i'd like people to be able to verify that the number chosen was fair. I know some sites use a "Provably Fair" system to achieve this where user input is combined ...
348 views

### Why can ECC key sizes be smaller than RSA keys for similar security?

I understand how ECC is based on the discrete log problem and RSA on integer factorization. I've read several references that show how a solution to either of these problems can typically be adapted ...
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### Diffie-Hellman: Does the size of the prime modulus depend on the potential size of the secret?

I'm writing my own cryptosystem that uses One Time Pad and Diffie-Hellman to generate keys for the OTP. I am using Rails on the server side and Javascript for the client side. Please don't tell me ...
196 views

### Does SpongeWrap (from the Keccak team) absorb ciphertext or plaintext?

I have been reading the Cryptographic sponge functions paper, but I'm still confused. Does Keccak in authenticated encryption mode absorb ciphertext or plaintext? Edit: Are there any test vectors to ...
113 views

### How well does breaking multiple DH key exchanges over the same group scale?

Suppose you are running a server with the Diffie-Hellman parameters (so the group G and generator g) generated once. There are ...
183 views

### Brute force attack expected running time

I am a bit confused about the expected running times of brute force attacks on different cryptosystems. So let's assume a key size of $2^n$ bits. Symmetric key cryptography: $E(brute)$ = ...
335 views

### Is CBC mode encryption vulnerable to a reordering attack?

I know that, if CBC-MAC is used in such a way that the tag is the concatenation of all the blocks' outputs (and not just the last one), it's insecure under CPA for the simplest case of 2 blocks ...
243 views

### Scalar Multiplication on Elliptic Curves

In the elliptic curve: $y^2 = x^3 + 20x + 13 \bmod{2111}$. Using the point $P=(3, 10)$ I am wondering how to multiply this point by the scalar $57$? I realize I can write $57*P$ as \$2^5*P + 2^4*P + ...
508 views

### How do I test my encryption? (absolute amateur)

I am a hobby programmer with a background in biology and have developed an encryption program based on DNA. I tried to make it hard to crack, but it's essentially a substitution cipher and uses the ...
233 views

### Why is it important to generate a pseudorandom permutation from a pseudorandom function?

Most of the papers on block cipher constructions, especially the ones which discuss constructing block ciphers of arbitrary lengths or small domains, the techniques are designed based on building a ...
286 views

### RSA 896 vs 1024 vs 2048 in Javascript?

I am currently working on a secure messaging website and I had been using RSA 2048 for encryption, decryption and signing of messages but I found it to be EXTREMELY LAGGY so i've moved to 1024. I did ...
187 views

### What is the limit of plaintext required to break the Vigenère encryption?

A theoretical question about the Vigenère cipher: Without any knowledge about the key (not even it's length) can we tell how much known or chosen plaintext is needed for the adversary to completely ...
119 views

### How does SSL secure the initial handshake?

I'm reading the SSL specs, and it seems that the initial handshake has no authenticity protection at all. What is to prevent, say, an attacker from overwriting the "available ciphers" list with one ...
364 views

### Some cryptography security questions

I recently had a discussion with a friend of mine about cryptography. As we are both no experts, I thought that I could better resolve are dispute here :-). My friend said that when he used public ...
193 views

### Hypothetical unknown cipher - security in obscurity?

I'm curious what would happen in the following scenario: Suppose an attacker gets a hold of a cipher-text of sufficiently large length. And suppose he has the means to verify a successful decryption. ...
162 views

### Having 4096 bit keys and short (< 256 byte) messages, can I simply use the key as OTP?

Assumptions: Alice and Bob use (cryptographically secure, hardware-rng generated) 4096 bit keys. Each message is encrypted using a new key; meaning: once a key is used, it's destroyed. Alice and Bob ...
210 views

### Security considerations on “expand 32-byte k”-magic number in the Salsa20 famility of stream ciphers?

I'm currently examining the NaCl library written by Daniel J. Bernstein and I noticed that the library hard codes the sigma: ...
1k views

### How much is slower GCM AES-128 than one of the stream chipher eSTREAM?

Evaluate the speed of the algorithm GCM AES-128 and compare it whith speed of one of the stream chipher in eSTREAM. Can someone give such an assessment?