All Questions

100 views

Would data be secure if a cryptographically secure PRNG was used for encryption?

For example, say you have a client and server. You use asymmetric encryption to securely deliver two seeds from server to client. Each user then seeds two PRNGs (one for incoming data, one for ...
218 views

How can A pass a message to B, while preventing a third party from sniffing infos?

$A$ has a message that he wants to send to $B$, without a third party being able to learn the contents of the original message. $A$ encrypts the message and sends it to a server. The server decrypts ...
95 views

Cryptographic Arithmetic Toolbox/Software [closed]

This term I have many cryptography courses treating finite fields. I was wondering if there is any good software that could help doing basic operations in galois fields etc. I already googled but ...
88 views

As the full version of HMQV is very long, I will give a graph of it below \begin{array}{@{}l@{}c@{}l@{}} \hat{A} && \hat{B} \\ (a,A=g^a)&&(b,B=g^b) \\ x\in_R[1,q-1],\quad X=g^x ...
168 views

Off-the-record communication

Is my protocol correct? For fun, I tried to design a protocol that would allow off-the-record communication. I'm not sure it works, I have a feeling there might be a problem with it that I'm not ...
91 views

How is a PRNG used in the PGP?

I'm currently reading up on the components of PGP and I am wondering what exactly the PRNG is used for. PGP uses ANSI X9.17 and entropy from a users keystrokes to generate a temporary key. So, is ...
113 views

Need 32-bit mixing function that has perfect avalanche between octets

for my hobby tinkering project, I need a mixing function that takes 32-bit input and has 32-bit output (and will, most likely, run in a 32-bit C environment) and the following property (independent of ...
115 views

Reusing PGP key when generating SSL Certificate Authority?

Does it make sense to reuse some of the keys from my PGP (gnupg, gpg) keyblock when generating my own SSL Certificate Authority (a toy one for myself and a few web services of mine)? In an ideal ...
106 views

Upper bound Linear Feedback Shift Register

It is clear that when we have any output stream $x_0,x_1,...$ produced by linear feedback shift register than this output has to be periodic. Now I was wondering if we can find an upper bound for ...
191 views

Is this new server API authentication protocol secure?

I need a secure protocol to authenticate client side users with my server which has an API. I am devising something more secure particularly to resist active MITM attacks where an attacker may modify ...
1k views

How to obtain KCV from the key

Simple question: we have AES 128 encryption and a key. How can we calculate the key check value (KCV)? One example: key is 48C3B4286FF421A4A328E68AD9E542A4 and KCV should be 77DC84. I am trying it ...
102 views

Authentication of machine before installation (to stop piracy) [closed]

I have a web-software project which needs a bit of protection in form of authencitation… This web based software runs on an intranet. There is no access to the internet from these terminal machines. ...
110 views

Decryption or attacking DES encrypted file

I have a file that has been encrypted using DES and am looking to decrypt and find a secret message encoded. All I have is the file which is full of binary data. There is no key or anything else which ...
63 views

How to pass an arbitrary signature to a certificate

I am trying to sign certificate (X509) using secret sharing. That is shareholders combine their signatures to produce the final signature which will be in this case the signed certificate. However ...
202 views

I found this question from a textbook but I don't really understand what it is asking: Suppose $c$ is $1$ block long, $a$ and $b$ are strings that are a multiple of the block length, and ...
119 views

Can you give me an example of any PKC encrytion algorithm with coins?

I'm reading a Definition of Public Key Encryption and here say: ... Enc is a (possibly) probabilistic polynomial time encryption algorithm which takes as input a public key $pk$, a $m\in M$ and ...
133 views

Feasibility of using a base 26 LFSR for cryptography by hand

I have been playing with base 26 LFSRs (i.e. using the alphabet) and noticed that the XOR operation for base 26 is just the tabula recta and so can be done very quickly. This made me wonder whether a ...
125 views

Why does Merkle's Puzzle requires Eve quadratic complexity of effort to break the system?

The way Applied cryptography 2ED explains the puzzle is as follows (I paraphrase it): Bob generates 2^20 messages of the form x,y where ...
182 views

In RSA, what is faster attacking “d” when plaintext is known, or factoring when M is unknown?

I'm aware of two methods to attack RSA: Brute force factoring, where no plain text is available Brute force (1/e) mod φ where the plain text is available as described here Question Given an ...
45 views

How can I evaluate the congruency of an AKS primality test?

Despite the fact primality test is a mathematical issue, it plays a part on the security of many cryptosystems such as RSA. I was trying to understand how it works until I came to the following ...
427 views

DES Key Schedule Algorithm

Reading through the DES Specification it says that the keys are permuted with PC-1 initially and then shifted left both $C$ and $D$. However, before it gets ...
227 views

Is SHA-256 a one way permutation when restricting the domain to {0,1}^256? [duplicate]

Suppose we consider the space of $\lbrace 0,1 \rbrace^{256}$ as the domain and SHA-256 as our hash function. Does SHA-256 become a one way permutation? Has anyone tried to prove this? Or can it be ...
178 views

132 views

The Goldreich-Goldwasser-Micali Construction with bad PRGS

I understand that if we have a secure PRG then the Goldreich-Goldwasser-Micali construction gives us a secure PRF. However, what I've not been able to find much material on is how will the GGM ...
55 views

How are the lower levels calculated using upper levels in an optimized Merkel Hash Tree?

I was reading about the TIK protocol for thwarting wormhole attacks on adhoc networks. It uses a Merkel Hash Tree to store keys. But since the number of keys can be large, the tree is optimized by ...
199 views

some of my confusions about DDH assumption

The wiki defines the decisional Diffie–Hellman assumption as follows: Decisional Diffie–Hellman assumption Consider a (multiplicative) cyclic group $G$ of order $q$, and with generator $g$. The DDH ...
153 views

Privately Sum Values without Dealers, MPC

Suppose $n$ actors each hold a plaintext $p_i$. We wish to find $\sum p_i$, without leaking any information about individual $p_i$. Any actor (or any link in the network) could be controlled by an ...
116 views

Can you help me understand PFS and wPFS?

Every time I encounter the concepts of PFS (perfect forward secrecy) and wPFS (weak perfect forward secrecy), I feel uncertain about them. My understanding is that: PFS ensures that, if the ...
146 views

Security of S/MIME in case of CA compromise

Suppose Alice and Bob are exchanging messages using S/MIME, protected by certificates that have been issued by either the same CA or by two mutually independent CAs. There exists an adversary Mallory ...
90 views

Where can I double check my elliptic curve results?

I am trying to do some elliptic curve calculations by hand, just to refresh myself on how the system works. I calculated some points and did some operations by hand. I am trying to double check my ...
136 views

SHA256 Round Equivalence

I have calculated the average number of operations in 1 round of SHA256 as follows: Additions: 9.25 Bitwise Rotations: 9 Bitwise Shifts: 1.5 Bitwise AND: 5 Bitwise XOR: 10 I have certain ...
140 views

Is this method of deterministically using CBC secure?

I'm trying to design a deterministic encryption scheme to enable searching in untrusted databases with the smallest possible IV overhead on ciphertexts. I know it's very bad practice but unfortunately ...
131 views

Is generating public key inevitably slow in classic Diffie-Hellman if the private key is large?

Let's say I pick a 3000+ bit prime $p$ for which I also know that $q = (p - 1) / 2$ is a prime. If I've understood correct, then I can pick pretty much any $g$. Is generating $g^x$ now inevitably ...
111 views

using random encrypted RSA challenge as key material

Assume a simple protocol for authentication - one side sends a randomly generated challenge string and encrypts it with RSA. The receiver decrypts it and replies with a hash of the challenge, proving ...
1k views

Generating a secure random number in javascript

What I am trying to do is generate a large (4096bit) random number in JavaScript that is cryptographically safe to use. My approach is the following: I am creating a ...
135 views

Probability for collisions of a one-way compression function

Given a one-way compression function $h:\{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}^m$ and an attacker that picks $x_1 \ldots x_t \in \{0,1\}^n$ (uniformly distributed), I have to show that the probability to find ...
383 views

Review of AES encryption concept for an open source project

i'm working on an opensource project, A generator for static (html/js), password protected photo galleries. The generator AES 256 encrypts many images with the same key in PyCrypto, and decrypt them ...
206 views

Asymmetric format preserving encryption?

I would like to encrypt a string asymmetrically. I would like the ciphertext to be as short as as plaintext. (or shorter) I've read about format preserving encryption functions - are there ...
568 views

Creating a PKCS#12 file where public key doesn't match the private key

For testing purpose, I want to create a PKCS#12 file in which the private key doesn't match the certificate. Is there any tool which will help me do this? If I use ...
150 views

Generate a new public/private key pair for each new message?

When using PGP type public encrypted communication, would it be a good idea to generate a new public for each message and attach that in the new public key in the reply to back to sender mail body? ...
134 views

Using plain Diffe-Hellman for server authentication with known public key

Other considerations aside, is it possible to use DH with an established public key (together with fixed g, p, q) to safely authenticate a server instead of using some signing algorithm? In other ...
176 views

Proof of work for determining whether a number is prime?

I have an idea for a system that would be outsourcing some brute force calculations to many users in hopes of finding divisors of a number. However, there is a possibility that a given number would be ...
264 views

How are Predicate Encryption algorithms implemented?

After a lot of reading on the internet, i can't seem to figure out how Predicate Encryption works. As i read, it consists of 4 algorithms: ...