# All Questions

281 views

### Is there an algorithm or hardware that can sign/verify natural time?

PGP/GPG can used to sign text, others use public key to verify them. So one could say, that these cryptographic algorithms deal with space. Are there any algorithms that can deal with time? E.g. I ...
3k views

### How does one calculate a primitive root for Diffie-Hellman?

In the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, one of the steps involves calculating a primitive root of a prime number $p$. How would one go about doing so, considering that $p$ could be very large? Is there ...
334 views

### Toy cipher — does it have a name?

When I was perhaps nine years, I borrowed a book from the library on various maths and CS topics. It outlined various simple ciphers, including one that I used a lot, just for fun. I can't remember ...
791 views

### Can one reduce the size of ECDSA-like signatures?

Using $n$-bit ECDSA, a signature has a size of $2·n$. It is possible to recover the public key from this signature, which shows that there is a publicly visible redundancy in the signature. Is ...
701 views

### How do you find a cheater in Shamir Secret Sharing?

If there are 4 people involved, and every two of them should be able to know the secret (the polynomial is just a line) and you are given f(x) and x for each of those people, and you know one of them ...
810 views

### Understanding CRC

There are zillions of articles describing CRC. What can I read to (more deeply) understand what's really going on? Both from an algebraic perspective and a bit-manipulation perspective, I'd like to ...
144 views

### Are more complex algorithms easier to break with timing attacks?

Is there a point where increasing the complexity of an encryption algorithm will make it easier to break using a timing attack? Or is there no connection here at all?
163 views

### How hard is to invert the function that computes the middle-bits of (x^2)?

I'm designing a function f that should be moderately hard to invert and very fast to evaluate in a modern CPU. The function will be used in a proof-of-work function. I've read that the middle-bits of ...
257 views

### Encrypting 8 times with 8-bit key beneficial?

I was trying to understand cryptography from the book Information Security by Mark Stamp and I am confused by something. Suppose that Alice has a secure block cipher, but the cipher only uses an ...
234 views

### Streaming API to authenticated encryption

In regards to NaCl, I asked DJB he had any intent to add a streaming API to an authenticated cipher. His response was obvious in retrospect, that one should never release a decrypted plaintext before ...
268 views

### How to choose constants in a cryptographic function?

A number of cryptographic functions have constants built in. For example, the constants used in RFC 2104 for HMAC, or the constants used in s-boxes (e.g., DES and AES), or MD5. In general, how are ...
314 views

### Key Length & Hashing

I need to use a hash function to generate a 128-bit key for a symmetric cipher. The specific cipher is from the eStream portofolio, called Rabbit. I am using the SRP protocol for authentication (a ...
2k views

### Why has the RSA factoring challenge been withdrawn?

Wikipedia states that RSA challenge has been withdrawn. Does it mean that an efficient factoring algorithm is "just around the corner"? or are there some other reasons? If the challenge was still ...
891 views

### Are there any Secp256k1 ECDSA test examples available?

Are there any available test cases for testing elliptic curves like secp256k1 (Korblitz curves from http://www.secg.org/collateral/sec2_final.pdf)? For curves like P192 there are for example those ...
255 views

### Why are the initial states of hashes functions (like SHA-1) often non-zero?

There is already a question asking "Why initialize SHA1 with specific buffer?" and my question follows on from this: Why are the initial states of hash functions often non-zero? For most, I have ...
234 views

### Finding hash almost-collisions

A few months ago, XKCD posted a challenge to find a plaintext which hashed (using Skein 1024 1024) to a specified value. Inputs were scored based on the hamming distance between the hash of the ...
233 views

### Why does HOTP use such a complex truncate function?

In the HOTP protocol after calculating a 20 byte hash it is truncated to 4 bytes. For this first an offset is calculated (low-order 4 bits of the last byte) which determines the four bytes to be ...
459 views

### Is an RSA variant with public exponent $e=f+(p-1)\cdot(q-1)$ safe (for $f$ random in some small interval)?

Alice is going to use some existing RSA scheme (employing industry-standard signature or/and encryption with proper padding), which she can't change, or influence beyond her choice of key. In this ...
3k views

### What are the advantages of TOTP over HOTP?

HMAC-based One Time Password (HOTP) was published as an informational IETF RFC 4226 in December 2005. In May, 2011, Time-based One-time Password Algorithm (TOTP) officially became RFC 6238. What ...
340 views

### Pairing-friendly curves in small characteristic fields

There are several well-known techniques to generate pairing-friendly curves of degrees 1 to 36 on prime fields GF(p): Cocks-Pinch, MNT, Brezing-Weng, and several others. In extension fields GF(p^n), ...
348 views

### Why restricting SHA3 to have only two possible capacities?

I just read the presentation slides of John M. Kesley (from NIST) for his invited talk at CHES 2013 about SHA-3 and learned that NIST is going to standardize Keccak with a possibly modified padding ...
132 views

### Any problems with this secure time synchronization scheme?

I have a time authority and I want to securely set a client's time to this authority's time/date within a precision of $\delta$ seconds. The authority's public key is known to the client. This was my ...
291 views

### What does “running in polynomial time” really mean?

I'm currently learning private-key cryptography. I've been able to see that perfect secrecy is achievable if no assumption is made about the computational power of the attacker. However, perfect ...
663 views

### Should I salt an AES password at each encryption?

I saw a sample code where the same password is salted with a different value (using PBKDF2) for each encryption. That means that the salt must be stored for each encrypted message. I don't understand ...
509 views

### Cracking WWII-era codes - code found on a pigeon's leg in Surrey

A recent BBC article entitled WWII code 'may never be cracked' posted a code: AOAKN HVPKD FNFJW YIDDC RQXSR DJHFP GOVFN MIAPX PABUZ WYYNP CMPNW HJRZH NLXKG MEMKK ONOIB AKEEQ WAOTA RBQRH DJOFM TPZEH ...
1k views

### How does order-preserving encryption work?

Order-preserving encryption (OPE) is, apparently, a method of encrypting data so that it's possible to make efficient inequality comparisons on the encrypted items without decrypting them. I've been ...
339 views

### Are there any authoritative definitions of “key stretching”?

This is mostly a terminology question, but I suppose that it is best asked and answered here. After browsing the Internet I have come across a fair number of completely different definitions of the ...
238 views

### Alice trusts Bob only when Bob trusts Alice

some story first: Alice and Bob both have public/private key pairs. Now Bob wants Alice to sign his public key id. Alice agrees but only when Bob signs the public key id of her. Is this something ...
2k views

### How does a birthday attack on a hashing algorithm work?

A "normal", brute-force attack on a cryptographic hashing algorithm $H$ should have a complexity of about $2^{n}$ for a hash algorithm with an output length of $n$ bits. That means it takes about ...
205 views

### K out of N encryption

A friend just showed me how to combine padlocks to achieve a lock that opens when k out of n people turn their keys. I was ...
147 views

### Is there any general description language for block ciphers?

In page 9 (16 in the PDF) of Final report of European project IST-1999-12324 (NESSIE), it is mentioned that: The NESSIE project is also developing a new generic tool to analyze block ciphers ...
249 views

### How to build an electro-mechanical public key cipher machine?

It is generally assumed that asymmetric encryption schemes were invented in 1973 at GCHQ in Britain and, independently, in 1976 at the MIT. Imagine, if the abstract idea of having a public key and a ...
1k views

### How will Cryptography be changed by Quantum Computing?

I realise this isn't a 'yes or no' question, and I apologise for asking something that could be seen as a discussion thread, but I had to ask. I'm currently doing an EPQ in CS (specifically how QC ...
133 views

### Are there any tools for expressing the cipher operations as a system of equations?

The first step In Algebraic-attack is expressing the cipher operations as a system of equations. Is there an automated tool to do this?
151 views

### Solving hard problems in $\mathbb Z_{p}^{*}$ when $\mathbb p$ is close to $\mathbb 2^{n}$

Suppose, for some security parameter $n$ you choose a prime $p$ such that $p = 2^n+c$ for some relatively small $|c| < 2^m << 2^n$. I have seen such primes being called Pseudo-Mersenne Primes ...
305 views

### Security of pairing-based cryptography over binary fields regarding new attacks

In the last week, the discrete logarithm problem was broken for the binary fields $\mathbb{F}_{2^{(14 \times 127)}}$ and $\mathbb{F}_{2^{(27 \times 73)}}$. Pairing-based cryptography using binary ...
274 views

### Is there any known malleability of scrypt outputs?

The scenario is single-use passphrase-based non-interactive message authentication. The obvious try to do this is to chose a random salt of the appropriate length and send: ...
210 views

### What is the sign bit for in Feige-Fiat-Shamir?

The Feige-Fiat-Shamir identity scheme is based on a ZKP assuming that square roots are "hard" modulo an integer of unknown factorization. The "parallel version" of this protocol includes a "sign bit" ...
124 views

### Why does it matter for a signature scheme to be without random oracles?

There is a profusion of articles proposing signature schemes without random oracles (see for yourself). What does that mean, and why does it matter?
263 views

### Is SSH public key authentication weakened by 'none' cipher?

As far as I know, SSH2 first does a key exchange based on the server host key and brings up transport authentication and encryption derived from this kex. The real authentication (password or public ...
328 views

### Is FIPS 140-2's “Continuous random number generator test” practical?

Section 4.9.2 of FIPS PUB 140-2 specifies, amongst other things, a "Continuous random number generator test." Here are the relavant bits: If each call to a[n] RNG produces blocks of n bits ...
219 views

### Why does Skein use an output transform, but other similar hashes don't?

Skein uses an additional compression function call to finalize the output, even when the output isn't larger than the native output size. The Skein paper says: Due to Skein’s output ...
554 views

### Implementation of Tao Xie and Denguo Feng's MD5 attack

It is well known that MD5 is completely broken today - however, to understand the theory behind the attacks I am looking for an implementation of the collision attacks described in the 2009 paper A ...
570 views

### Applications of Group Ciphers

I've been reading a paper [1], and I've ran across something called a "Group Cipher", which is similar to homomorphic encryption, with an important difference. In homomorphic encryption we have an ...
629 views

### Is RSA padding needed for single recipient, one-time, unique random message?

I want a way to encrypt files using this process: http://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/15 . That is: generate a random password, use that to AES-encrypt a file, and use an RSA public key to encrypt the ...
277 views

### How to best obtain bit sequences from throwing normal dice?

Throwing normal dice, one can get sequences of digits in [0,5]. Which is the best procedure in practice to transform such sequences into bit sequences desired?
2k views

### How to generate a list of unique random strings?

How would you generate a list of distinct random strings, where all strings are alphanumeric and have a fixed length?
823 views

### Security of simple xor and s-box cipher?

What weaknesses (or strengths) do block ciphers based on only key xor and s-box have when operating in CBC mode? A cipher's internal primitive might be a simple as this: $C = S[M \oplus k]$, where ...