All Questions

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Any stream cipher with avalanche effect?

As far as I know, all stream ciphers work by generating a stream of pseudo random bytes, and XOR it with the plain text to get the cipher text. It has the property that one bit change in the cipher ...
47 views

What information should I send along with an AES ciphertext and is there any standard to do that?

While using some crypto implementations I got to see that many times a comment is added to the ciphertext. For example: ...
143 views

Is finding collisions in a part-hash not often enough a bad problem?

My situation: I've been working now for a couple of months on my own unique hash function, I've changed it many times and had two main versions but I won't bore anyone with the details of my work; at ...
30 views

What is PCT_SSL_CIPHER_TYPE_1ST_HALF?

I'm writing a tool to do security posture assessments of SSL/TLS services, and ran into an interesting result. I ran through all defined cipher suites to test which could be negotiated (like sslscan ...
188 views

Considering the following encryption scheme where RSA is used to encrypt a plaintext m and then we choose a random r and compute: $$A = r + m^e \bmod N$$ and $$B = r^e \bmod N$$ So the ciphertext is ...
196 views

Alice answering Bob without knowing the question

I'm a student and I don't know how to solve the following problem : Alice is proposing a 10 questions list to Bob. Bob choose only 1 question and wants to know the answer without Alice knowing the ...
129 views

Will entropy be lost by using a DRBG?

Lets assume we have a DRGB (deterministic random bit generator) which is seeded by a good true RBG (random bit generator). Before any bit has been read from the DRBG, the entropy is clearly the number ...
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Truncating ciphertexts on ring-LWE schemes

On the section 5.4 of the paper Improved Security for a Ring-Based Fully Homomorphic Encryption Scheme, the authors explain how to discard some bits of the ciphertexts to get smaller ciphertexts and ...
135 views

CTR DRBG dependent on request size?

I am trying to understand the CTR DRBG specification in NIST SP 800-90A. It seems slightly different to a pure stream cipher in that the key and counter are reset after each generate call using the ...
171 views

Is there any relation between two strings with the same MD5 hash?

Is there any relation between two strings with the same MD5 hash? For example these two strings: ...
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MD5 Hash outputs not produced

Are there any hash outputs not produced by the MD5 hash function? I need to use it as a placeholder for an empty hash while comparing two hashes.
61 views

Re-sending captured encrypted data

Let’s assume Bob is some algorithmic stock trading machine. Bob takes commands from Alice, who sends messages to Bob. For example: Alice could be sending a message to Bob to stop trading. But if ...
157 views

How can cryptographic signatures be somehow linked to a physical signature?

A few days ago, I was asked to sign an online document over DocuSign as well as on SignEasy, any the signature were accepted just by a physical signature sent over email or on the app. They did not ...
128 views

Encrypt a message with hash function, shared symmetric key, but no cipher

I am very new to Crypto and need some clarification or input. The question is: Suppose that Alice wants to encrypt a message for Bob, where the message consists of three plaintext blocks, $P_0$, ...
125 views

How does DSA provide non-repudiation in proving a document was properly displayed (not altered or displayed incorrectly)?

I am building an iOS app that allows the user to sign a document served to them by a web server. So that page of the app simply has a document in the top pane, and at the bottom pane, a place to sign ...
124 views

Challenge-Response Phases in IND-CPA

The IND-CPA game has two challenge-response phases A key is generated by running $Gen(1^n)$ and challenger selects a bit b {0,1} uniformly at random. Adversary gets input $1^n$. Can query the oracle ...
126 views

Is it possible to reverse the birthday attack calculation?

I find that for every 100 password salts in our database, we only average 94.73 distinct salt values (averaged over a total of around 18 million). Is there a way to take that observation and calculate ...
135 views

Paillier Cryptosystem - Practical applications?

I wonder: are there any real-world practical applications using the Paillier cryptosystem , as introduced in [1], or some derivations of it? I'm aware of quite a few schemes proposed in literature ...
86 views

Is there a practical security difference between OTP with letters and OTP with numbers?

Is there a practical security difference between “OTP with letters” and “OTP with numbers”? If, for example, I encrypt a letter message using Tabula Recta with a random letter key, I would get: ...
151 views

Safety of AES ECB when used with openssl_seal function

I'm trying to use PHP to encrypt files with a public key. I'm using the function openssl_seal that "encrypts data by using RC4 with a randomly generated secret key." RC4 is considered unsafe so the ...
403 views

Cryptography and FPGA

I see a lot of papers about FPGA implementations. For what kind of "concrete" application should we implement cryptographic algorithms on FPGA ? Which secured application require such a huge data ...
61 views

Are deployed MACs IND-CPA?

There are a number of message authentication codes (MACs) used in practice. They are highly used in practice (f.ex. in TLS), but there's (at least) one application where they can't be used: Full Disk ...
345 views

What are the implications of a birthday attack on a HMAC?

After collecting approximately $2^{n/2}$ message-tag pairs a collision can be observed. So two different messages (m1 and m2) will have the same tag. This paper states: Then, for any string x, ...
49 views

Favor hash size or field size when systems are disparate?

I'm working on an implementation of Krawczyk's Hashed MQV (HMQV). I'm using Crypto++, which is a C++ library. C++ has some features where classes that represent the crypto objects can be combined ...
164 views

Determine AES key given encrypted and unencrypted files

Given an encrypted file, the original unencrypted (cleartext) file, and knowledge of which AES encryption algorithm was used, is it possible to determine the key that was used to encrypt the data in a ...
211 views

Can there be a need for 1024-bit (symmetric) encryption?

I think we are all aware of the CAESAR-competition. Now the aim of this competition is to select a (portfolio of) winner(s) which provide authenticated encryption. I'll now assume that the results ...
209 views

How often does RSA-OAEP have a leading zero?

We are working with a third party vendor who is very tight lipped about their security protocols, and one of our customers who used this vendor's products is claiming that approximately one in every ...
133 views

Simulation aborted because the adversary doesn't use the random oracle

I'm trying to construct a proof for an encryption scheme in the Random Oracle model. This encryption scheme is like a PKE scheme but with an additional function that kind of "alters" ciphertexts ...
338 views

AES and Homomorphic Encryption

Is it possible to do the following? Input would be to generate a new AES key, encrypt the private data with that key, encrypt the AES key with the FHE key, and send the FHE-encrypted AES key along ...
123 views

Doubling a point on an elliptic curve

I'm working with the elliptic curve $\mathcal{E} : y^2 = x^3 + 11x^2 + 17x + 25$ over $(\mathbb{Z}_{31},+,\cdot)$ and am trying to double $P=[2,7]$. Following the instructions here, I'm doing the ...
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How to calculate if probability is negligible or not

If i have probability $Q = 2C(A\times B)$ where $A$ and $B$ are unknown probabilities and $C$ is a non-negligible probability, what can i speculate about probability $Q$ and how can i calculate bounds ...
222 views

Are well designed crypographic codes unbreakable? (NOT ciphers)

Codes are not to be confused with ciphers. It is known that all known ciphers are theoretically breakable except the one-time pad and this isn't what the question is about. Some cryptographic codes ...
435 views

If a system hashes passwords with a 256-bit long hash, are passwords (which are not necessarily alphanumeric, can be any value per byte (0-255)) longer than 32 bytes useless under the context in which ...
222 views

Elliptic curve cryptography G*G

I understand how ECC works for the point multiplications and stuff. All we normally do is to multiply a scalar number (lets say d as a private key) with the base point generator ...
149 views

Secure ElGamal with OAEP

Is it possible to make ElGamal IND-CCA2 using OAEP or OAEP+? (OAEP+ from: "OAEP Reconsiderd" by Shoup) The reason I ask is that I recently answered this question and it came to my mind that OAEP or ...
138 views

Coding of unsigned int to prevent guessing next ID

Suppose we are assigning records an unsigned integer ID from a N-bit space (say 32-bit) in a sequential manner. Is there a way we can code this ID before showing it to the public such that someone ...
98 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 ...