# All Questions

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### Complexity class of an idealised version of Bitcoin's proof-of-work (hashcash)? [closed]

To formulate this question precisely, I will define an idealized hypothetical "perfect" hash function $H(n)$ which has nice scalability properties, and will formulate a problem PERFECT HASHCASH in ...
139 views

### Hash function that is efficient on GPU and poorly suited to ASIC

I have such requirements to the hash function in my project: operating on 32-bit data, not mathematically breakable (built on existing hashes known to be secure), free of branching, as much as ...
121 views

### simple multiplication in GF(8)

I am trying to do multiplication in the GF($2^3$) defined by the irreducible minimum binary polynomial $X^3+X^2+1$. I want to multiply $A(x) * B(x)$ where $A(x) = x$ and $B(x) = x^2$. The ...
104 views

### If its possible to derive the public key from a private key, why can't we go in reverse?

I'm looking at source code for BitcoinJ that derives a public key from the private key. ...
286 views

### How can I simulate and measure brute force hacking using RSA?

I want to implement brute force hacking using RSA. How can I simulate and measure time duration? What software (or software-based simulator) would be needed?
180 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 ...
500 views

### Computationaly hard detokenization algorithm for credit card numbers

I am designing a vault that tokenizes credit card numbers (a plaintext that consists of 16 decimal digits), with the following requirements: Given some plaintext, the vault returns an index. If ...
98 views

### Needed: signature over a collection of hashes

I'm looking for some kind of crypto-based data structure that will allow me to produce a signature over a set of hashes. Call this a SignedSetOfHashes. I want to be ...
141 views

### Is there a standard way to extend the output of a hash?

Say I have a hash function, a state-of-the-art hash function that we would all approve of that produces a fixed number of bits (n) as output. (I'll call it HASH.) Is there are a standard way to ...
1k views

### Does the elliptic curve (EC) cryptosystem outperform RSA and DL cryptosystems?

Throughout the literature, it is stated that EC cryptosystems outperform RSA and Discrete logarithm cryptosystems, but I cannot understand how ECC would be more efficient than RSA and DL in terms of ...
58 views

### What does the notation $1^n$ stand for? [duplicate]

I'm seeing this all over my Katz and Lindell book and I don't see where they introduced it.
380 views

### Is the random data at the end of my decrypted message supposed to be there?

This is my PKCS#5 & AES/ECB Python 3.3 code: ...
181 views

### Prove preimage resistance property

Let $f : \{0,1\}^* \rightarrow \{0,1\}^n$ and $g : \{0,1\}^* \rightarrow \{0,1\}^m$. $h$ is created by concatenate f and g: $h : \{0,1\}^* \to \{0,1\}^{n+m}$ with $h(x) = f(x) || g(x)$. How do I ...
287 views

### Safe elliptic curve point addition using projective coordinates: How do I tell if the points are the same?

I am trying to implement elliptic curve point addition in hardware for NIST p256 and p384 curves. I have noticed the following issue with the suggested NIST routines: Routine 2.2.7 of ...
78 views

### Hashing a uuidv4 + time to create a unique id

First, I am no crypto expert although I am doing the MOOC. I have an item which has as id: uuidv4 When I create this item: I create a new uuidv4 check if it already exists and if not, I store it ...
486 views

### Is there a technique to confirm that a given large integer value is a product of two primes?

Given a list of 2048 bit integer values in which one or few 2048 bit integer values may be product of two prime numbers and other values may be just 2048 bit odd integers numbers. My question is - ...
143 views

### What are unified addition and differential addition in elliptic curve point arithmetic?

A lot of papers use these terms but I do not find a proper explanation of them. Can somebody tell the meaning / difference / intuition / application and if possible with an example.
130 views

### How to determine which type of crypto is used in a text file? [closed]

is there a tool or a way to determine which type of crypto is used in this type of text: ...
196 views

### Unique, anonymous online authentication

Is there a way to authenticate users online without knowing their real identity yet preventing them from registering twice? If not, what is the least amount of information you would need? If it helps, ...
703 views

### What is a Non-Interactive Zero Knowledge Proof?

I understand the concept of a Zero Knowledge Proof thanks to the easy to understand analogy of Alibaba's cave. However, this seems to require interaction between the verifier and the other party. I ...
95 views

### AES CBC encoding of decomposable OAuth2 tokens

We're building a stateless RESTful API that relies on the content of OAuth2 tokens to identify users and what they have access to. Users authenticate with other means and are given a token, which they ...
73 views

### Collecting entropy from a stream to a file

I have a potentially infinite stream of data originating in some physical phenomena that may expose random behavior (due to quantum effects, thermal noise, the butterfly effect in chaotic dynamical ...
175 views

### Generating Diffie-Hellman parameters efficiently

I am working on an Android project for school and I am supposed to do a DHKE (Diffie Hellman Key Exchange). Everything works well. The problem is that it takes a lot of time (really a lot) to ...
197 views

### Short length asymmetric encryption?

I want to send out short messages to the world which listeners could verify to be send from me. The way this is usually done is to encrypt the message with a private key where the readers decrypt it ...
352 views

### Encrypting a payload for transmission over HTTP. AES256 with PBKDF2

I've done some reading about implementing AES256 and deriving a key from a password. If I understand correctly: I want to generate a new salt (for the key) and a new IV (for the encrypted message) ...
235 views

### One-way permutation over a small interval?

I am wondering what concrete computable functions we know that are a permutation over an integer interval of parameterizable size $s$, for relatively small $s$ starting circa $2^{64}$, to perhaps ...
211 views

### What are some restrictions when converting Montgomery Curves into Weierstrass Curves?

I want to represent a Montgomery Curve (curve25519) in Weierstrass form as a personal exercise. After doing some math and referencing the conversion equation at ...
105 views

### Diffie-Hellman explicit key confirmation

Suppose I wanted to add explicit key confirmation to Diffie-Hellman key exchange, would the following scheme be secure? Alice selects a random $a$ and sends $g^a \mod p$ to Bob Bob selects a random ...
2k views

### Is 80 bits of key size considered safe against brute force attacks?

I came across KATAN Family of Ciphers for small domain input blocks . They cipher arbitrary block lengths 32,48,64 but their key size 80 bits only. Is 80 bits of key size considered safe with ...
141 views

### Is the Couvreur et al. polynomial time attack on McEliece practical?

There's a new e-print out on arXiv titled "A Polynomial Time Attack against Algebraic Geometry Code Based Public Key Cryptosystems" by Alain Couvreur, Irene Márquez-Corbella and Ruud Pellikaan: ...
78 views

### Why do authors execute a leakage resilient election protocol inside a leak-free phase?

In the paper "Multiparty Computation Secure Against Continual Memory Leakage", on page 1241 (that's page 7 of the PDF) under section 2.3, the authors discuss "The Election Protocol" that they use to ...
186 views

### Why is a simple hash into $G_2$ for (certain) pairing based crypto not possible?

In the paper Pairings for Cryptographers we read about what the authors call a type 2 pairing in which we have a "pairing friendly curve $E$ over $\mathbb{F}_q$ with embedding degree $k>1$ and ...
320 views

### Is the inverse of a secure PRP, also a secure PRP?

If a block cipher is a secure PRP, is it's inverse a secure PRP as well? My intuition says yes but I'm not exactly sure. On a related note, if a block cipher is a secure sPRP, is it's inverse a ...
72 views

### For $e(g, d) = c$, can we compute $d$, given others

Given $$e(g, d) = c$$ where, $e$ is bilinear pairing function chosen by the user/attacker, the values of $g$ and $c$ are known $g, d ∈ \mathbb{G}_1$ , $c$ depends upon the $e$ can we somehow ...
316 views

### Known vs. Chosen (plaintext and ciphertext) and RSA

I want to know whether I can break RSA (textbook) with known plaintext/ciphertext attacks. Known plain-text Let $c$ be the ciphertext and $m$ the plaintext. $$c = m^a \mod n$$ Since all I have is ...
90 views

### Do both client and server need to implement OpenSSL protections to protect from CBC attacks

In regards to the protections implemented in OpenSSL 0.9.6d (described in section 2. http://www.openssl.org/~bodo/tls-cbc.txt). My understanding is that the mechanism prepends an empty record when ...
128 views

### Homomorphic Encryption Notation Question

What does the following notation mean in a homomorphic encryption scheme? ENC(x;r) What does x and ...
251 views

### Practical (and secure) PRGs

Does anyone know if there exists a PRG construction which takes as input an (RSA-sized) integer seed and outputs a fixed number of bits? There are number-theoretic PRGs such as the RSA, ...
479 views

### Securely send public key from client to server in RSA?

I have a client and a server communicating with messages encrypted using RSA. Initially, the client knows server's public key, but the server does not know the client's public key. Is it possible to ...
113 views

### Is this EAX extension weakening the (provable) security of EAX?

I would like to insert a key deriving function into EAX mode, in order to hamper brute-force attacks for a key-size restricted cipher (56 bits). The modification inserts an identical multi-block ...
239 views

### Cryptanalysis and weaknesses of SEED cipher

I've discovered that a client has SEED enabled in their SSL ciphers, and would like to know a bit more about it from a security perspective. The Wikipedia article doesn't mention any flaws, yet I've ...
221 views

### Can padding length, and thus plaintext length, be considered public information when using aes-cbc?

Right now I'm using a simple padding system that takes the plaintext, hashes it with SHA512, and appends $x$ bytes of the hash as padding where $x$ is the delta between the plaintext and nearest ...
60 views

### Protocol/algorithms based on a variable-length input PRF

Are the proofs based on a PRF assumption still valid when using a variable-length input PRF ? The answer might be obvious, but I have a doubt.
114 views

### No Birthday Attack to TCR

I'm reading the paper “Collision-Resistant Hashing? Towards Making UOWHFs Practical” , which compared TCR (Target Collision Resistant) and ACR (Any collision Resistant). It says we wish to stress ...
411 views

### Security of Pohlig-Hellman exponentation cipher?

I am looking into implementing Pohlig-Hellman exponentation cipher and I would like to know how secure that algorithm is? I am guessing it's security relates greatly to the prime number used in it. ...
122 views

### How would using only one s-box affect security of Blowfish?

Schneier says: Fewer and smaller S-boxes. It may be possible to reduce the number of S-boxes from four to one. Additionally, it may be possible to overlap entries in a single S-box: entry 0 ...
120 views

### On the Definition of a PRG and a CSPRG

I've been looking at the definition of a PRG, here. This is a broader notion than a cryptographically secure PRG ("CSPRG"), which is described here. I am realizing that I am very confused by this ...
58 views

### Bicliques for permutations

So I'm trying to understand the complexity of the biclique attack on Grostl and I have some questions: 1) The paper introduces sliced bicliques where on Grostl one constructs a biclique of dimension ...
I know that there are elliptic curve groups, used in pairing-based cryptography, where the decisional Diffie Hellman problem (ie. given $g$, $g^a$, $g^b$ and $c$, determine if $c = g^{ab}$ is easy but ...