# All Questions

1k views

### Keeping IV secret for AES CFB mode

I'm developing a security/encryption software and I'm using AES CFB (block size: 16 and key size: 32 bytes). I want to know, if I also keep IV (32 bytes) secret like the key itself (32 bytes), would ...
620 views

### Forgery Attack Against RSA Digital Signature

I have been reading about attacks against RSA Digital Signature in a book The attacker chooses the signature first and then computes the message. As a consequence, he cannot control the ...
311 views

### Two-dimensional S-Box

Consider the following simple cipher: $$c_1 = S(m_1 \oplus k_1) \oplus k_2$$ Where $S$ is S-box, $m_1$ - 16-bit plain text, $k_1$ and $k_2$ is two parts of 16-bit key. If S-box is standard then this ...
120 views

### What's the alternative should PKI collapse?

Premises - please check it and critique if necessary: If factoring the products of large numbers suddenly becomes simple, PKI goes up in smoke. Is this correct? If it is correct, it seems to me ...
959 views

### What are the advantages of CBC over ECB?

From this question I understand that, for a block cipher, using CBC is better than ECB. It seems that if one only has part of the cipher text, then decryption is difficult because the decryption ...
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I was trying to implement zero knowledge protocol for authentication based on the paper "A Practical Zero-Knowledge Protocol Fitted to Security Microprocessor Minimizing Both Transmission and Memory". ...
128 views

### With Encrypt-then-MAC, and flexible protocols, do I need to authenticate the authentication?

Sorry, the question is not easy to state (or wasn't for me, anyhow). So I'm writing a very flexible format for security. It allows for full choice of cipher, key size, and so on, along with key ...
196 views

### How does a backdoor in the RNG enable an attacker to break encryption protocols?

I'm wondering how a backdoor in a random-number generator (as rumored the NSA have placed), actually compromises the security of things like VPNs or TSL/SSL. What I understand is that, if such a ...
258 views

### Can we say that if $P=NP$ there is no CPA secure public key encryption?

I've learned that public key encryption is based on the problem of Discrete Log (as regard to group theory) which believed to be hard. But, can we say that it doesn't matter on which problem our ...
320 views

### Single Party Encryption, Multi Party Decryption

I am looking for an adequate protocol for public key decryption, which would allow $n$ parties to jointly decrypt a cipher text. The usage scenario for such a protocol would be a mixnet that wouldn't ...
211 views

### Solve a Modular Exponentiation

It might be common, but if we had to solve an equation like this $m=s^{e}$ mod $n$ where $m,e,n$ are known. How can we find $s$. What optimisations could be applied? And what would the complexity of ...
440 views

### ECB weakness and its exploitation

Lets say that I have a server which encrypts information at the server side using ECB mode with the blocksize of 16. If the server appends data that I control with a secret and sends back the ...
886 views

### What happens to entropy after hashing?

What happens to entropy after hashing? Suppose you have a key with entropy $k$. Can entropy $k$ be increased by hashing the key?
573 views

### Can we ensure the security of a crypto-algorithm and -implementaton against acoustic cryptanalysis?

Like people always say: “Attacks only get worse…” — which is why I'm asking early. I have been reading the paper “RSA Key Extraction via Low-Bandwidth Acoustic Cryptanalysis” published December 18, ...
257 views

### How can uniformity of hash functions (e.g. SHA-256) be proved?

In reading about the Bitcoin protocol I noticed how much its proofs-of-work apparently depend on uniformity of the SHA-256 hash function. And so presumably do many other applications. How do ...
273 views

### Brute Force on 3DES with Reduced Keyspace and Unknown IV

I'm trying to brute force a 3DES problem given a reduced keyspace (ie I know the first half of the key) but with an unknown IV. The code decrypts to plaintext. My first thought was that I could set ...
119 views

### Is this algorithm demonstrating “proof of work”

Is this algorithm demonstrating proof of work? This is a algorithm where a "token" is combined with a time stamp and then a cryptographic hash is generated from the combination, next the objective is ...
223 views

### Can $r$ and $s$ from an ECDSA signature be negative numbers?

I have an ECDSA implementation in Mathematica over secp256k1 and $r$ and $s$ are always positive numbers. But if you encode them as bytes, the most significant byte can be over ...
123 views

### Calculate entropy of key derived from PBKF2 function

I am using PBKF2 to derive a encryption key from a password. suppose entropy of my password is y and my PBKF2 function has x number of iterations. So how to calculate the entropy of finale key derived ...
304 views

### Is SSL broken? If so, what can I do about it? [closed]

But recently, with the scandals about the (in)filtrations, I read that the NSA (and of course others, but I'm not particularly worried about NSA) is able to break SSL and track your data. It is true? ...
410 views

### Guessing encryption algorithm based on key and ciphertext

Is it possible to tell which encryption algorithm was used, assuming I have a key and a encrypted text? To not complicate the situation let assume we are speaking about symmetric algorithms only. ...
962 views

### How to perform authentication without central server in P2P?

How can one be sure that the man who you're talking with is the one who you think he is? i.e. How can one perform authentication in P2P network without a central trust server or Certificate Authority? ...
115 views

### How to use HKDF to combine two keys

I have heard that to combine two keys HKDF is better than using XOR function. But if you look at the HKDF RFC I could not figure out how to use it for concatenating two keys. What I can see is HKDF ...
575 views

### Pollard’s Rho Method

I can't get my head around Pollard’s Rho Method for solving discrate log problem I have read in a book: The basic idea is to pseudorandomly generate group elements of the form α^i · β^j ...
200 views

### Outsourcing arbitrary computations securely

Consider the following scheme. Alice wants Bob to make some computations for her, but she doesn't want to reveal the data on which he's going to do it. So, she encrypts the data, sends them to Bob, he ...
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### RSA exhibits symmetrical properties — is it possible to form a cryptanalytic attack?

This question is broken into two sections really: Symmetry in RSA I have been analyzing raw RSA and I have noticed some interesting symmetrical properties of the algorithm. Assume that $M$ is a ...