# All Questions

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### Diffie-Hellman is Post-quantum secured?

If Alice and bob have a secure channel for key-exchange and mallory don't man-in-the-middle attack them but in the future eavesdrop connection and see the key exchanged, can mallory break it like RSA ...
2k views

### Is it safer to encrypt twice with RSA?

I wonder if it's safer to encrypt a plain text with RSA twice than it is to encrypt it just once. It should make a big difference if you assume that the two private keys are different, and that the ...
1k views

### How can I use eulers totient and the chinese remainder theorem for modular exponentiation?

I'm trying to implement modular exponentiation in Java using Lagrange and the Chinese remainder theorem. The example we've been given is: Let $N = 55 = 5 · 11$ and suppose we want to compute ...
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### One time pad key exchange

If two parties want to communicate with securely using OTP , how is the key ( that is lengthy as plain text) shared with other party for decryption ?
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### When is each key used when encrypting an email using OpenPGP?

When you send an email using PGP to encrypt emails, is the recipients public key used to encrypt the email, or is your private key used? Are they both used? At what points do each of the four keys ...
418 views

### What is the strength of unpadded RSA?

I would like to use unpadded RSA for homomorphic encryption in a toy P2P game, for things like fair coin flips and shuffling. How many bits of security does unpadded RSA have, in relation to its key ...
483 views

### Can I combine two of SHA-3 candidates cryptography hash functions and obtain more secure Algorithm?

For example, Is possible to combine (Concatenate or Chain or XOR) Skein SHA-3 candidate with Grostl SHA-3 candidate to increase security? Note: I just want more secure output and CPU cycles does not ...
226 views

### Aes encryption -The relevance of static matrix in mixcolumns operation

Can someone explain to me the relevance of the static matrix used for the mixcolumns operation in aes encryption.i.e the relevance of why the byte is multiplied by 2 + next byte multiplied by 3 + next ...
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### What are the dangers of predictable (repeated) plaintext structures?

When using a "good", modern cipher (specifically one that provides ciphertext indistinguishability), is it a problem at all if there is some well-known structure in all plaintexts? For example, ...
150 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 ...
122 views

### KDF with low-entropy salts

I need to derive a key from a username and a password. These are the only two things I have access to. What I thought is using PBKDF2 with username as the salt and password as the master password. ...
438 views

### Poor man's SSL - is this method as safe as SSL/TLS?

I need to send data between two applications. I've got requirement that says that data should be transmitted using secure protocol such as SSL/TLS. Data is sent using TCP sockets and I don't have ...
178 views

### How hard is to find the operators of an addition knowing the sum of them?

I want to learn whether or no there is a cryptographic primitive,scheme assumption that is based on the following hard problem if it is hard . By hard we mean that we have a polynomial adversary: The ...
224 views

### Using compression to test encryption

Is the uncompressibility of encrypted data a necessary property for a good cryptographic algorithm? To make a crude experiment, I encrypted an 8K file with all 'A' and then compressed both the ...
335 views

### How do I demonstrate that a PRNG not designed for cryptography is not suitable for generating passwords?

This is a replication of this question on Stack Overflow. There's class Random in .NET runtime which is designed for use as a cheap fast source of pseudo-random ...
197 views

### Can the premaster secret generated by SRP be used as a secure private key?

It seems like the pre-master secret generated during the SRP protocol would make a good source to generate a shared private key using a secure hash to compress it down into a 128/256 symmetric key. ...
239 views

### Cryptographically strong pseudo-random seq. generators

If a pseudo-random sequence generator is built so that it uses an n-bit seed and outputs a string that is of length x. Let's say one wants to generate a bit string of length y and uses the previous ...
365 views

### How to generate successive stream-cipher keys?

I've identified a weakness in a distributed simulation system I'm looking at, and I'm looking for some advice on how to fix it. Clients initially negotiate an authentication token with a login server ...
244 views

### Seeking special-use fingerprinting/hashing algorithm

For a project I wonder if there exists some kind of fixed-size checksumming/fingerprinting function in which based on this fingerprint given data block 1, it is easy to generate more data blocks that ...
881 views

### Finding CRC collisions for specific divisor

My current textbook (Information Security: Principles and Practice by Mark Stamp) discusses how to determine the CRC of data via long-division, using XOR instead of subtraction to determine the ...
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### How can I repeatedly prove I have data another has seen without sending the data and without the other storing the data?

I would like to know if this is theoretically possible, or impossible, and if possible, if there is any algorithm/protocol to accomplish this... I want another entity, lets call them the Auditor, to ...
409 views

### What algorithm does PGP use to encrypt email?

I know it uses RSA/DSA to create keys, but does it use that same algorithm for the actual cipher?
140 views

### How to collect, process, and transmit data securely?

In my question "Authenticating data generated by a particular build of an open source program", Dave Cary requested that I post a question stating my real problem on a high level rather than the ...
123 views

### Hash functions to the power of two and three notation

I have found in a Wireless Sensor Networks security paper, operations where cryptographic hash functions are elevated to the power of 2 and to the power of 3 (i.e. $h^2(x)$ and $h^3(x)$). This might ...
153 views

### Why is diffie-hellmangroup1-sha1 used instead of diffie-hellman?

For SSH why is diffie-hellmangroup1-sha1 used instead of just diffie-hellman? In other words, why is the hash function used?
124 views

### Differential Fault Analysis of AES

Let's say: an error is induced into an implementation of the AES-128 to produce a faulty ciphertext. The error is a one-byte eror and is always induced on the last state byte, during round9, before ...
68 views

### How obvious is it to decrypt numerics encrypted with a reused one time pad?

For instance say you encrypt text using the one time pad and you end up with some scrambled text that appears illegible. If you reused the key for multiple times for enough text, someone could ...
32 views

### Is this JS library using openssl genrsa -rand improperly?

pem, a JS wrapper around openssl, has the following code in it: var params = ['genrsa', '-rand', '/var/log/mail:/var/log/messages', keyBitsize ]; Am ...
123 views

### Using hash for one time pad key

Recently I've been delving into security algorithms, I already knew some of the (easy) math behind AES and RSA and how to and not to implement it. But well, i got a bit bored so i thought I'd just do ...
84 views

### Hash “Preimage by product” resistance

Let H() be a hash function that achieves collision resistance as well as first and second preimage resistance. Let's equip the output set of H of a multiplicative group structure, more precisely a ...
107 views

### Do all stream ciphers (and AES-128-CTR in particular) produce equal output size as the input size?

I'm particulary interested on knowing if the output of the AES-128-CTR ciphertext is always going to have the same size as the input plaintext, or it could be padded somehow. It seems so from my tests ...
204 views

### Solving Quadratic equations in Galois Field (2^163)

Hello I am working on implementing a message to elliptic curve point mapping hardware circuit I have done some research and found out the koblitz mapping method: I will be using a field of binary ...
119 views

### Is the salt used with PBKDF2 secret?

I have two network endpoints that need to use the same derived key. Can the server send the salt to the client 'in the clear'?
115 views

### secure embedded/microcontroller crypto using AES-ctr with hmac-sha2

The embedded device is a low-power 8-bit microcontroller (memory usage is constrained to about 10kb code, 1kb ram). As the device is battery-powered and manual service should be minimal, more powerful ...
78 views

### what are multi-primes and how are they different from semiprimes?

I came to know of semiprimes recently. The simplest explanation of semiprimes is you take any two prime numbers and you multiply them, say 3*11 = 33 in which case 33 would be a semiprime. The numbers ...
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### What is the difference between order of base point and curve order in EC? [duplicate]

When I was read about the elliptic curve cryptography I found some definition about domain parameter of elliptic curve like the follow. But I did not understand something $p$: prime number. $a, b$: ...
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### Why is this cryptosystem insecure?

Can someone help me see the flaw in this cryptosystem? Note: This is homework and it is due today at 1:30pm. An answer before that is not expected; I'd just like to understand what the flaw is. ...
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### Is XCBC where k2 and k3 might be the identical, secure?

XCBC paper says all three keys should be independent. It doesn't say they must always be different. However it seems this is necessary to differentiate padded message and message without padding. ...
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### Why are some key stretching methods better than others?

I'm trying to understand why some key stretching methods are better than others. The wikipedia article presents 3 different key stretching methods: A collision prone simple key stretching ...