# All Questions

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### Key size limitations due to software compatibility?

At the moment, much popular encryption-based software routinely handles up to 4096 bit keys and standard usage is broadly migrating from 1024 to 2048 bit keys. Hashes widely used are MD5/SHA1/SHA256 ...
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### Clifford Cocks Interview: “Raising numbers to a power with the product as modulus”

Disclaimer: I'm new to cryptography Background: Clifford Cocks, the former GCHQ mathemetician and crytologist, gave an interview where he said: "My thinking was that you need something that is ...
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### warning: 'gcry_ac_key_t' is deprecated [migrated]

I am implementing gcrypt library and I face some issues with data types. I want to instantiated data types for private key and public key. What I found is that I can do like this: extern ...
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### What info should be signed with a digital signature to provide entity authenticaton for DH?

$i \to r\colon\; g^x\bmod p$ $r \to i\colon\; g^y, \langle g^y,g^x\rangle_r$ $i \to r\colon\; \langle g^x,g^y\rangle_i$ Looking at run 2, I am trying to work out why it is necessary to include ...
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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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### can anyone explain inversion per byte?

I am designing the truncating block of SHA3 algorithm , there its given that first we need to do the inversion per byte of the 1600 bit output and then truncating it to give 512 bits output. Can any ...
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### How many bits of symmetric security does RSA-3072 actually provide? [duplicate]

I know that the sizes are standardized to $1024$, $2048$ etc. but they actually provide different security than $128$, $256$... for example $\texttt{RSA-}2048$ is actually $112$ bits of security and ...
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### UKS attacks. Dangers & Prevention?

I am trying to understand how to prevent a UKS (unknown key-share) attack, but I am having trouble finding many resources out there to help. Let's imagine a hypothetical secure messaging application ...
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### How can public key not reverse encryption if the algorithm is known? [duplicate]

I've been reading about WhatsApp getting "end-to-end" encryption, and when reading about it, I've notice something. If I want to send a message from cell $A$ to cell $B$, since there's a public key, ...
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### Combining multiple PRGs together

Got some theoretical questions about PRGs to solve (given by lecturer for self-learning, no score involved). Tried to find on the internet but couldn't figure out how to solve them, so I will mention ...
198 views

### Formal verification in cryptography

I have seen in some places that people use formal verification and/or computer-aided verification for cryptography (tools like ProVerif, CryptoVerif, etc.). How do these approaches work?
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### Can you give me a summary of cryptographic hardness assumptions?

Until recently, I had a link to a website which summarizes up-to-date cryptographic hardness assumptions. But, unfortunately I cannot find it. The webpage is categorized well problems such as, DL ...
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May I know what method should I use to solve question #3? I totally don’t understand it and I can not find any things about the clocking pattern on the internet. Is it still using LSFR to ...
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### Filling in MD5 input variables

I have a majority of an input string(as well as the total length) and the output for an MD5 hash. Is there a way to calculate the remaining input bytes that I am missing?
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### CryptDB data re-encryption and onion layers

From the CryptDB paper , I understoond that the onion layers once decrypted are not re-encrypted. Only columns which are queried infrequently will be re-encrypted to higher onion layers. But if we ...
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### Do I need to use a MAC with asymmetric encryption?

The internet has drilled into me that when I delivery any symmetrically encrypted data, I should also deliver a MAC to authenticate it before any decryption occurs. Do I also need to do this if I use ...
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### Unpredictable value rotation

I have very vey basic skills in cryptography, it's hard for me to explain clearly my problem so I will start with an example. Estimote beacons have a security function called secure UUID, once ...
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### Is it safe to use the same IV for multiple encryptions in AES CBC mode when you are always encrypting random bytes?

I am generating random bytes (16 or 32 bytes at a time), and I want to encrypt them using a 128 bit AES key in CBC mode. Am I really weakening this horribly if I am reusing the same IV and key each ...
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### What problems with “random” data would cause this result from Ent?

I'm playing around with a novel kind of source of "random" data and Ent is currently giving me results like this: Entropy = 7.977080 bits per byte. Optimum compression would reduce the size of this ...
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### Can XTS + checksum be used for authenticated encryption?

Is it possible to use XTS+a checksum for authenticated encryption? Specifically, it seems like a good $n$ bit checksum applied before encryption should ensure that any change to the ciphertext ...
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### Is it okay to use Threefish-512 in ECB mode with Poly1305 MAC to protect some AES keys?

A person has some independent AES-GCM-SIV keys they need to protect as part of a hypothetical protocol or product, where it is publically known that it is in fact AES-GCM-SIV keys that are being ...
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### Product of Vigenère ciphers is not a Vigenère cipher with length of LCM

I have always thought that using two Vigenère ciphers leads to another Vigenère cipher with key length of LCM (least common multiple) of the two previous Vigenère ciphers. But I have stumbled upon ...
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### What is the difference between PBE and symmetric key encryption?

What is the difference between PBE (password based encryption) and symmetric-key algorithms? My understanding is that symmetric-key algorithms like AES and Twofish are used in PBE. Hence PBE is just ...
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### Scalability of homomorphic tallying

Whenever I look at online voting schemes, the idea of homomorphic encryption being a key concept, specially in the form of homomorphic tallying, appears to be universally accepted. The accepted answer ...
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### Calculation of the avalanche effect coefficient

Given a strict avalanche criterion matrix/dependence matrix for a hash function,how do I calculate the avalanche coefficient for it. I want to calculate a single parameter(value) which represents the ...
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### How does the split mask countermeasure work on AES?

I am trying to understand the split mask countermeasure which is a masking method to avoid side channel attacks. Let's first describe the principle and then try to apply it to AES. I found this paper ...
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### Is the Discrete logarithm problem suitable for this pairing scheme?

Let $Ans$ be the product of two pairings : $e(g,h)^{k} \times e(g,h)^{r}=Ans$ If everybody knows only $[g,h,e(g,h)^{k}]$ but $[r,Ans]$ is not known. In the discrete logarithm problem, the user knows ...
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### How to make the range of modulo $p$ to $[-\frac{p}{2};\frac{p}{2}]$?

I am using NTL (A Library for doing Number Theory) to implement a FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) scheme. In general, the range of modulo p is $[-\frac{p}{2};\frac{p}{2}]$ in FHE scheme. However, ...
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### Is webkey a reasonably secure authentication system?

I just created Webkey in the last couple days. This should allow any website to do single-password auth with a much higher level of auth security and convenience for users (single password with ...
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### What are fixed points and length extension attack in hash functions?

I was recently reading about hash functions, and I came across fixed points (one or more fixed points, interested in both) and length extensions, but I didn't exactly understand how these work. If ...
1k views

### Is there something wrong with my decryption using key=9, mod 26?

I am new to cryptography and have started looking at some basic encryption. I have the following question to answer: Decrypt the the following encrypted quotation using ...
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### How to prove a symmetric encryption scheme provides perfect secrecy?

I learned in class that in order to achieve perfect secrecy, the source of the plaintext $\mathcal{P}$ needs to be independent from the source of the encryption key $\mathcal{K}$. We also learned that ...
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### How do I create a secure encryption scheme using addition?

You have a 4 number long PIN code with each number ranging from 0 to 9 which you wish to encrypt. You are then given a random 4 digit number ranging from 0 to 9999, which when added to the original ...
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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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### Trusted Third Party Cryptanalysis Labs?

There's no doubt that third party cryptanalysis is an essential part of the crypto ecosystem. It's how we know that there's some degree of practical "goodness" to a new algorithm or protocol. Unlike ...
1k views

### Does composing multiple substitution ciphers improve security?

Will using two substitution ciphers one after the another be more secure than using single substitution cipher?
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### How does SSL work on the browser

I recently bought an SSL certificate from a website and was able to make it work on my Apache server. As far as I know, it uses asymmetric keys and the private key is stored on the server while the ...
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### How SAM modules secure transactions?

As you know SAM Modules are used mainly in the electronic payment industry. Due to the low security of key storing in general storage devices or MCUs, Manufacturers used SAM modules for secure storing ...
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### Decoding the Playfair cipher with a crib [duplicate]

I have a Playfair cipher text and I know a portion of the text (one world). How can I decode the cipher from here? Thanks.
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### For RSA keys, is the safety of a given key-length different for signing vs encryption?

I'm wondering if considerations of key-length are different when thinking about signing vs encryption. If for some reason, it was safter to use smaller keys for signing that would be interesting.
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### What is the advantage of Pseudosquare?

Pseudosquares ,which are not square but Jacobi symbol are still 1, are used in some cryptographic algorithm. What is the advantage of them over the exact squares? If we used squares instead of ...
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### The state in RC4-128

I'd ask what's the state in rc4 algorithm and its size depend on what? If the plaintext 8x3 bits and key of 4x3 bits What the size of s in this case?
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### Best Attack Against HFE cryptosystem

I am looking for the best know attack against HFE cryptosystem. Reading this paper DEGREE OF REGULARITY FOR HFE I found the next claim However, Faugere and Joux demonstrated that we can solve and ...
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### Non-iterative cryptographic hash functions

Consider the following cryptographic hash function $H$ which maps a message $m$ of variable size to $b$ bits: $$H:\{0,1\}^{*} \mapsto \{0,1\}^b$$ $$y = H(m) = SPRP(IV||m||padding)\mid_{b}$$ , where: ...
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### What is this “finite field cryptography”?

See RFC 5931 § 2.2.1 which talks about "finite field cryptography" as opposed to elliptic curve cryptography and it looks like it is describing the Diffie-Hellman protocol. But Diffie-Hellman is not a ...
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### Check if a number is Carmichael number efficiently

I am trying to implement Modified Miller-Rabin Algorithm by Shyam Narayanan (https://math.mit.edu/research/highschool/primes/materials/2014/Narayanan.pdf). The algorithm demands to check if a number ...
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### How to use the Extended Euclidean algorithm to invert a finite field element?

I was doing some practice on cryptography (I'm new to this topic) and was wondering what the following question even means or what it is asking me to find. I do know how to do Extended Euclidean ...
### How is it possible that $g^q \equiv 1 \pmod p$ for a generator g?
The context of this question is coming up with the parameters for the ElGamal encryption scheme. One of the requirements for the parameters for ElGamal is that we have primes $p$ and $q$ such that \$p ...