# All Questions

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### What does SSL use? RSA? El-Gamal? Elliptic curves?

I'm not sure what SSL uses to share the symmetric key to both end users, i.e. at the beginning of the communication. Is it RSA? Or El-Gamal? Or something else?
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### Getting the encryption method and key from the encrypted data and the raw data

I have some pairs of plaintext and ciphertext data, from which I need to be able to decrypt the other passwords stored in the database. The password field typically contains something like ...
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### What is sent on the initial communication with Kerberos?

When a user wants to communicate with another user (let's say Alice and Bob), what is sent over the network during the initial communication? Alice uses her Kerberos client and enters her password ...
361 views

### Where can I find useful data for cryptography/coding theory?

When implementing cryptographic/coding theory algorithms one need to use data like big prime numbers, numbers in $Z_n$ and their inverses, irreducible polynomials in $Z_n[x]$ and so on... While ...
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### Importance of round complexity in determining the efficiency of an MPC protocol

Literature has different ways of specifying complexity of an MPC protocol: computation complexity that measures the number of (assumed primitive) operations performed by all the parties; ...
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### Is the use of AES in LoRaWAN correct?

I'm reading about LoRaWAN (specification). This network protocol has a particular way to encrypt data, detailed in the part 4.3.3.1. Here is a recap of how the encryption work, as I understood it. ...
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### Should I add randomness at the end before AES?

Seen AES, changing a character drastically affects the encrypted text. I want to make it harder to decrypt AES I send. So, it seems this can be done by adding some special code and some random bytes <...
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### AES 128 bits with 12 bytes IV vector composed of a 4 bytes counter : safe?

I have a 128 bits AES cypher (GCM, Galois/Counter Mode) using a 12-byte initialization vector (IV) composed of: 8 constant bytes: 6 bytes (device ID) 2 bytes (zero) 4 bytes (incrementing frame ...
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### Shamir's Secret Sharing vs. Asmuth-Bloom scheme

I need to make use of a secret sharing scheme and I don't really know how to decide which one to use, Shamir's or Asmuth-Bloom (using CRT). The complexity for recovering the secret seems to be linear ...
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### How to reverse engineer a cryptography algorithm if some input-output pair is known.

I am trying to reverse engineer an unknown encryption algorithm. By this, I mean I dont know what kind of algorithm is used to encrypt the words. But I know some input-output pairs. From this point ...
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### What's the safest TrueCrypt algorithm and hash?

I have an encrypted file container inside my NTFS pendrive. The root folder Write permission is blocked for everyone. A folder inside it has all permissions unblocked. The dummy file of TrueCrypt is ...
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### Finding Private key in RSA with public key, cipher text and plain text

Is there a known 'non-brute force' method of determining a private key in an RSA system when all other parameters are know? I found the values of a ciphertext ($C$), its corresponding plaintext ($P$) ...
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### How do I attack an RSA setup where e is even?

As a challenge, we were shown an RSA setup where we have a big $n$ (617 decimal digits), $e=4$, and asked to recover three messages. (However, the messages are padded to the same length as the key ...
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### Periodic One Way Function

Is there any notion of a periodic OWF? I.e. an OWF $f$ that on every input $x$ in its domain it holds that $f(f(f\ldots f(x))\ldots )=x$ when $f$ applied many times, each time on the previous output....
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### What is the correct name for bytes which are to be signed?

I have some bytes, and I sign them with my private key using ECDSA. The resultant (71) bytes are the signature. But what is the name of the bytes I have signed? (If this were encryption, they would ...
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### Is md5(x)&md5(y&x) secure?

I was wondering if the following hash function f(x) := md5(x) & md5('abc'&x) (with & as concatenation operator) is secure. This schema can be even ...
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### Hiding identifying data while allowing matching?

I do research with people about their illegal drug use, and for one project I'm doing surveys with them when they visit a needle exchange. So over time the same people get repeatedly surveyed as they ...
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### Encrypt with one cipher and decrypt with a different cipher?

I recently installed an android app called Secret Space Encryptor and think I found a serious flaw in it. Let me explain: This app provides a variety of different ciphers to use and I used Threefish ...
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### What is the difference between the standard representants of $\mathbb Z/q\mathbb Z$?

The symbol $\mathbb Z/q\mathbb Z$ (given that $q$ is prime) represents the prime field $\mathbb Z_q$. Basically, the elements of this field are represented by $\{0, 1, \dots, q-1\}$, let's call this ...
203 views

### Physical entropy source: How many bits entropy per byte is sufficent?

8 bit / byte would be perfect obviously. head -c 1M /dev/urandom | ent gives ~ 7.9998 bits per byte. Now, if I have a physical entropy source, how much entropy ...
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### Is it practical to use a stream cipher in a block cipher mode?

My idea is to use a stream cipher encrypting 16 bytes at a time as a primative block cipher in a mode of operation such as CBC mode. Is this practical or useful in any way?
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### Why does consecutive permutations or consecutive substitutions not enhance security?

My professor stated that permutations which are done repeatedly does not further enhance security than just one permutation. He also stated that fact this applies to consecutive substitutions as well. ...
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### Why can the last block contain a full block of padding in CBC Encryption?

I'm trying to understand the SSL Poodle Attack and I'm wondering why the last block of a CBC Record can be full of padding? Wouldn't that mean that the useful data was already a multiple of the key ...
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### Why can't garbled circuits be reused?

There are a bunch of papers do research on resizable garbled circuits. But I wonder why garbled circuits cannot be reused? For example, the constructor constructs a garbled circuit of "AND" like this:...
1k views

### Comparing Files: Is it better to use multiple hash algorithms or just one?

I'm looking to compare (for byte-for-byte equality) two binary files. I already have the process down: Check for existence etc. Compare file lengths Use a hash or CRC of a sort (right now I use MD5)...
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### How does MD5 process text which is shorter than 512 bits

MD5 processes a 512-bit block and produces a 128-bit (16 byte) message digest often expressed as 32-digit hexadecimal value For example if I hash the word "how" using MD5 , I get the following hash ...
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### What weaknesses in Hash_DRBG did NIST find and fix?

Matthew Green states in the Practical Kleptography presentation (video, at about 12:15) that Hash_DRBG (from SP800-90A) as originally proposed by NSA had potentially exploitable flaws or bugs and that ...
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### Why is Rijndael key length restricted?

Why is Rijndael restricted to key length in $\lbrace 128, 160, 192, 224, 256\rbrace$ bits (and not larger)? The algorithm looks to me like it would support an arbitrary-sized key (multiple of $32$). ...
273 views

### Simple proof of work example?

Can anyone show me a simple proof of work algorithm that I can use to stop spammers? I've looked at hashcat, but i think there's a bit too much specialized hardware for bitcoin mining. That is, the ...
363 views

### What is a generator?

I am trying to read up on the math behind DH and ran into the word generator used a lot. I am not sure what it means. Can someone explain? I see this question where the OP talks about g as the ...
1k views

### Does the secret key used in AES have to prime?

I’ve looked around this site and the web quite a bit, but can’t find a definitive answer on whether or not the secret key $k$ used in the AES crypto-system has to be a prime number? Or can you just ...
248 views

### Perfect Forward Secrecy in TLS

I read that TLS does PFS using Diffie Hellman. However, DH can be used even without certificates - so how is DHE-RSA better than plain DHE? Is DHE a insecure algorithm, that DHE-RSA is needed?
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### Third-party security issues with Shamir's secret sharing scheme

In Shamir's secret sharing scheme, we are trusting a third party who generates the secret polynomial. How can we ensure security here when we are involving a third party?
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### Difference between lightweight, online and low memory Authenticated Encryption schemes

What is the basic difference between the following types of Authenticated Encryption (AE) schemes? Lightweight Authenticated encryption Online Authenticated Encryption Authenticated Encryption for ...
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### How is a public key actually used to encrypt something?

One thing cryptography articles never seem to explain is how the message actually gets encrypted. You get this long-winded lecture on number theory which ends with, Ta Da! and we have a public and ...
811 views

### Hashing SHA-512 1000 times

SageMathCloud security (http://goo.gl/dCujW1) is as follows: Only the hash of your password is stored by the server, which uses 1000 iterations of the sha-512 hash function, with a salt length of ...
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### Why can't hashes be reversed with toffoli gates?

This is a follow up question to this question: Crack cryptographic hash functions using Toffoli gates?. Suppose there is a hash function $$H(x)=y,$$ where $x$ is the input of the function and $y$ is ...
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### Chance in cryptography

I was just thinking about my own chance and the way chance can defeat even the most advanced algorithm. My thought was : you can make a strong session id, but what if by chance, a hacker set this ...
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### unique one-way hash

For a 10-digits numeric domain (swedish social security numbers), is there a hash function with the following properties? no two numbers result in the same hash it is not possible to deduce the ...
451 views

### Why is time-lapse cryptography not popular?

Time-Lapse Cryptography has been introduced by Michael Rabin and Christopher Thorpe in the paper “Time-Lapse Cryptography”, but it does not seems to be popular. It is a really good paper with an great ...
350 views

### Can one use a Cryptographic Accumulator to efficiently store Lamport public keys without the need of a Merkle Tree?

One of the problems of one-time Lamport signatures is that public keys are disposed after use, so you must generate many keys and store them in a Merkle tree. The root is the "real" public key and ...
3k views

### How to break AES/CBC/PKCS5 when key and IV are reused?

I'm doing a code review for a crypto solution that reuses the same key with a constant IV. I want to demonstrate that this is not the right way to do things by figuring out the key and decrypting all ...
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### How should we interpret the cryptanalysis results of SIMON and SPECK?

The NSA recently released SIMON and SPECK light weight block ciphers. Although initial spec release did not have much of cryptanalysis details, two works later appeared providing the cryptanalysis for ...
3k views

### Attacking 2DES efficiently

Meet in the middle on 2DES uses $2^{56}$ memory. Given the fact that the attacker has only $2^{45}$ memory. How can the attacker adjust the attack so even with this memory limit, it will still be more ...
2k views

### What does an RSA signature look like?

I am using OpenSSL libs to generate signatures. Internally, I learn that a signature is a hash of the message with some padding added to it. I am trying to understand the structure of a signature. If ...
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### Openssl & RSA : how many public exponents are possible?

I would like to know if it is possible to set the public exponent we want with "OpenSSL RSA" or if it is really limited to 2 possible exponents: 3 65537 If yes, why ?
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### Meet-in-the-middle with checking complexity

In regards to meet in the middle type attacks, I have been considering the amount of operations in order to successfully find a key given two sets of plaintext / ciphertext pairs. All of the sources I ...
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### How to hash a list of multiple items?

In some protocols, a key is derived from a hash of many parameters (K=H(param1,param2,param3)) Is there a hash function that takes many parameters as input ? Or we can simply use a function like ...
In the zero knowledge proof using QR, why do we even bother with the server sending us $b = 0$ back? As I understand it, the server selects $b = 0$ or $b = 1$. If $b = 0$, then the client (Alice) ...
Assume an ElGamal Cryptosystem. Assume a set of three players, $P_1$, $P_2$ and $P_3$. The private key $x$ is shared among the players. The player $P_1$ has a piece of the private key $x_1$, $P_2$ has ...