# All Questions

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### Can CMAC be used as a 128bit Key Derivation Function?

I want to derive a key a number of times for a deterministic scenario, where I can get n keys from a single one. The logic looks something like this: ...
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### What are the pros and cons of SIP media encryption types SRTP, ZRTP, and DTLS?

I'm just getting used to SIP for my first time using Linphone. Which encryption is better and why? My Settings > Network > Media Encryption has the options of SRTP, ZRTP, and DTLS.
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### How much does using the same $H$ for all messages weaken GCM?

How much is GCM weakened by using the same MAC key $H = E_K(0^*)$ for all messages that use the same key (which is what GCM actually does) instead of using $E_K(N||0_{32})$ (which is different for ...
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### Why only one secret value with Shamir's secret sharing? [duplicate]

Shamir's Secret Sharing works by sharing data points on a curve, whereby when you have the required number of data points, you can find the function of the curve and find out the secret, which is ...
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### What are the time considerations with regard to security against birthday attack?

When designing security for a physical safe, one of the critical specifications is how long will the safe resist attack, this tells you how quickly you must detect and respond to an attack on the ...
102 views

### Space needed to store an RSA private key

How much space is actually needed to store a $4096$-bit RSA private key? I originally assumed $0.512$ kB since $\frac{4096}{8} = 512$, but then I started to wonder whether it was in hex. Simply, ...
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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 ...
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### 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: ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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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 ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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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.
136 views

### Double randomised HMAC verification to prevent timing attack

A way to prevent timing attacks for hash string comparison is to perform additional HMAC signing in order to randomize the verification process (see Double HMAC Verification). In addition to the ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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 ...
129 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, $P_0$, ...
131 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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### Same 64-bit preimage resistance security for SipHash and SHA-512/64?

If I have to chose a 64 bit preimage resistant hash function; will there be any difference in security between SipHash and SHA-512/64 (SHA-512 truncated to 64 bits)? How long will it take an ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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, ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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 ...
222 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 ...
217 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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### Password length versus hash length?

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 ...