# All Questions

120 views

### Blowfish vs. Twofish regarding power consumption

If I wanted to use Blowfish or Twofish to provide security on a device where power consumption is crucial. Regarding power consumption, which one would win? Generally, which algorithms are known to ...
264 views

### Pailler and Gentry - homomorphic encryption

Paillier cryptosystem is a probabilistic asymmetric algorithm for public key cryptography. Doesn't homomorphic encryption schemes have regular effects on the plaintext, and does that mean Pailliers ...
57 views

### The improvement of the private key exponent in the M.Weiner Attack

I am working on attacks on RSA and came across the M. Weiner attack. The limit for $d$ in order for the attack to apply is $d <= (\frac{1}{3})N^{0.25}$. The paper states that Boneh and Durfee ...
126 views

### Encryption time in ECC

In RSA, encryption time is usually much less than decryption time due to having a small public exponent. Can this be achieved in Elliptic Curve Crypto (ECC)?
42 views

### Can anyone explain how the modified r-adding walk works?

I was going through a paper titled “Accelerating Pollard's Rho Algorithm on Finite Fields” by Jung Hee Cheon et al. I understand the table(Ml) creation part of it, but after that I somehow fail to ...
171 views

### How can one parallelize tasks in CTR-AES for maximum performance?

From what I have read it seems like one of the purported benefits of using CTR mode AES, is that it can be parallelized to a greater degree, or maybe more easily than the other block cipher modes, ...
251 views

### What's the advantage of using OFB/CFB/CTR modes over a stream cipher

As far as I understand: The primary disadvantage associated with stream ciphers is the need for a random and unique key for each run in order to protect against reused-key attacks. OFB/CFB/CTR block ...
97 views

### Integers in ECC

Let A be a point on curve with integral coordinates. Does k.A necessarily have integer coordinates? If so than why and if not than how to find A and k such that k.A has integral coordinates.
375 views

### Uniform distribution/randomness of characters in the sha256 hash?

I'm using the sha256 algorithm to generate a number in one of my programming projects. A sha256 hash is calculated from three strings: one the user can edit, one the user can view but not edit and one ...
252 views

### PBKDF2-SHA512 - Does a Big Salt Decrease Security?

I use PBKDF2-SHA512 with an iteration count of 128,000 to hash my passwords. I use a CSPRNG to generate a salt per password. However, I am unsure about the ideal size of the salt. I have read a lot of ...
86 views

### Looking for crypto with derived keys?

I am looking for cryptographic algorithm or combination of them. Basically I need an algorithm, which can generate private key and for this key can be computed multiple keys based on some seed. So a ...
154 views

### Reductionist proofs of decisional problems to computational

Are they any reductionist proofs where an attacker $\mathcal{I}$ for a well established computationally "hard" problem $\mathsf{Π}$ is employing an attacker $\mathcal{A}$ who we assume is able to ...
47 views

### Common pitfalls of session key activation?

Assume that initiator $I$ and responder $R$ of a key agreement protocol have agreed on new symmetric session keys $K'_{auth}$ and $K'_{enc}$, e.g. by way of Diffie-Hellman and key derivation, possibly ...
2k views

### Why is plain-hash-then-encrypt not a secure MAC?

It seems that even in MAC-then-encrypt systems like SSL, something like HMAC is used rather than a plain hash. Why? Suppose we use some stream cipher; then why can't we use $Encrypt(m | H(m))$ as ...
104 views

### Need to generate new DH keys for every message in OTR

Going through the OTR specification I don't quite get why a new DH keys (and hence new symmetric key and hmac key) are generated for each message to be sent. Why is this necessary? I don't think it ...
145 views

### How to handle the GCD(V,P) != 1 case when doing point addition or point doubling in elliptic curve cryptography

The equation for a finite field Elliptic Curve is of this form: $$y^2 \equiv x^3 + a * x + b \pmod{P}$$ When we do common EC operations like point doubling or point addition we need to calculate the ...
61 views

### AES/CBC fixed Initial vector use-case [duplicate]

I am using AES/CBC to encrypt my http cookie. I never encrypt the same cookie value twice so my understanding is I don't need to use a random initial vector - using a fixed initial vector is fine for ...
58 views

### For enciphering messages with AES in CTR mode, do I need a different key for each message?

I have written a program to run AES in CTR mode with keys of 128,192 or 256 bits and checked it gives correct results with the data given in section F.5 at ...
244 views

### Does ECIES imply authenticity?

Assume: Alice and Bob both generate separate EC keypairs Alice obtains Bob's public key, and together with her private key creates a shared secret key Alice encrypts a message using the shared key ...
519 views

I'm relatively new to encrypting, and I have some questions. I intend to write a standalone C# program that will write and read an encrypted file with sensitive data using a password entered by the ...
330 views

### Does data authenticity always, implicitly, provide data integrity?

Does a scheme which provides data authenticity (e.g. HMAC or RSA signature) always implicitly provide integrity? It seems, to me at least, that it must by necessity. However, I have seen ...
90 views

### (n,n) Shamir secret sharing [duplicate]

In (n,n) Shamir secret sharing if n shareholders do not have the public values (X values) can they still obtain the secret with only Y values?
859 views

### Is RSA key size the size of private key exponent in public key encryption?

I have implemented a key pair generation scheme for RSA algorithm. I have taken the length of private key exponent as RSA key size, but then I've got to know that RSA key size is the size of the ...
71 views

### Want to use ECC but am clueless [closed]

First off, I'm not an experienced cryptography or computer person, please bear with me. I have some basic experiences with PGP software though (not much of a redemption huh?). I have some data that ...
56 views

### How to write the encrypted message after using RSA

I have created a RSA encryption/decryption program but how do i write out the results after doing a encryption? Right now I have it so that it will just print out the decimal value of one character ...
482 views

### Quantum key distribution simulation

I'm looking for a simulation of the Quantum Key Distribution protocol. Does anyone here have one that they could recommend?
73 views

### Error propogation in CBC mode

Going through the wiki for modes of operation I see that the section error propogation says that an error in one block in the ciphertext in CBC mode only impacts two blocks. I do not quite get that. ...
148 views

### Chosen Ciphertext Attack with a theoretical decryption machine

Say we have an encryption algorithm that encrypts data blocks of 128 bits size, and makes them cipher blocks $C = E(P)$ without chaining. Also assume there is a linearity rule for XOR: For every pair ...
214 views

### Illustrate NTRU using lattices

I studied some papers related to NTRU. All these papers describe NTRU as a lattice based cryptosystem but I could not find any paper which illustrates NTRU algorithm from lattice point of view. It ...
77 views

### Pairing Field size as security parameter

I have read Pairings for cryptographers: It states that the groups $G_1$ and $G_2$ are groups of points on the curve and the group GT is a subgroup of the multiplicative group of a related finite ...
199 views

### KDF followed by a Hash?

It is my understanding that a KDF adds entropy, whereas a hash loses information. I've read that KDF should be used to store passwords. I don't understand why we don't use a KDF and then a hash, so ...
88 views

### Why would splitting a password output be better than separate HMACs for encryption/authentication key derivation?

In a recent question I asked here on crypto.se, an answer was given that surprised me a bit. As mentioned in the referenced question, I'm looking to derive encryption and authentication keys from ...
309 views

### Is there a public-key cryptography method that enables public keys to be much smaller than private keys?

Does a public key cryptography method that enables the public key to be orders of magnitude smaller than the private key exist?
115 views

### Journals to read in order to keep up to date with interesting research [closed]

I'd love suggestions from crypto.stack as to academic journals to read. They can range from introductory to advanced, as long as it's free (requires no access fees). Feel free to edit this question ...
1k views

### Generating Encryption Keys from Biometric Fingerprint Templates

How would one go about generating Encryption Keys from Biometric Fingerprint Templates extracted from a fingerprint using either Griaule SDK or DigitalPersona SDK or any other SDK that will return the ...
97 views

### Efficiency of chaining AES “groups” of blocks

From ISO/IEC 23001-7:2012/Amd 1:2012 10.2.2 Creation of Initialization Vector (Informative) Decryption efficiency may be improved if subsequent initialization vectors use the value of the last ...
82 views

### order of elliptic curve divisible by prime

Why order "u" of an elliptic curve "E" defined over a finite field "GF (q)" (u = | E / GF (q) |) must be divisible by a large prime number r to be appropriate for cryptographic purposes?
118 views

### How does CBC work with read-write volumes?

I have read an article about an attack on LUKS in CBC mode and had a look at the WP article about CBC and now I am confused. If I have understood that correctly then changing the plaintext of a block ...
184 views

### What is the “artificial abort” technique?

In the security proof of Brent Waters's paper Efficient Identity-Based Encryption Without Random Oracles, he uses a novel “artificial abort” step on page 6. At this point the simulator is still ...
358 views

### Reverse engineering a single checksum byte [closed]

I am working to understand a system which saves a few bytes of data together with what appears to be a single checksum byte that provides a very naive guarantee that the data has not been tampered ...
191 views

### How can I perform matching on an “encrypted- fingerprint feature matrix” using Fully Homomorphic Encryption?

I am doing a finger-print authentication process. The feature-extraction using minutiae has been done and I get an N x 6 matrix, where the 6 columns are {$x_i$ ...
151 views

### What are the major flaws and limitations of this hash-based stream cipher design?

K is a 224-bit key. C is a 32-bit counter; it is publicly known. the same value is never used twice. ...
321 views

### Encryption and HMAC key derivation

I'm deriving keys from a user-supplied passphrase for symmetric encryption using AES-256 in CBC mode with a HMAC for authenticity/integrity. My key derivation function currently looks like this: ...
111 views

### How does this SSL-related flaw work?

I just saw a video at CNN in which it is claimed that, if the server isn't generating a random public key, the server can be hacked. First how HTTPS works… to be sure I’m on the same page: Server ...
68 views

### Problem with anonymously merging information from distributed sources

Some Background: There is an entity with an identifier and some information. The identifier of this entity is a string with a known scheme/pattern(Which means the total number of such possible ...
330 views

### How is padding oracle attack mitigated by encrypt-then-MAC?

Let us suppose Alice sends a message to Bob. As far as I know, the most popular scheme of MAC-then-encrypt is as follows: Alice computes the HMAC of the plaintext using her private key, and then ...
203 views

### weaknesses in ElGamal with public key of small order

Suppose $p=29$, $\alpha = 2 \in F_p^*$ is a generator of $F_p^*$. Bob picks $d \in \{2,...,27\}$ such that $\beta = \alpha ^d=28 \pmod{29}$. He then sends his $(p,\alpha ,\beta)$ to Alice who herself ...
138 views

### Understanding math behind RSA key derivation [duplicate]

I was reading through the key derivation for RSA. Here are the steps per wiki - Select strong primes $p$ and $q$ such that $pq = n$ $\phi(n)$ = $(p-1)(q-1)$ select $e$ such that $e$ and $\phi(n)$ ...