# All Questions

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### Does ssl_rsa_with_rc4_128_md5 have known weaknesses?

My bank's website uses HTTPS with the cipher suite ssl_rsa_with_rc4_128_md5. What are the known weaknesses of this suite? Do they have a practical impact for ...
137 views

### How does an oblivious test of plaintext equality work?

Assume an ElGamal Cryptosystem. Assume a set of three players, $P_1$, $P_2$ and $P_3$. The private key $x$ is shared among the players. The player $P_1$ has a piece of the private key $x_1$, $P_2$ has ...
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### How can I prove/disprove that a construction yields a secure PRG?

Let $G:\{0,1\}^{*} \mapsto \{0,1\}^{*}$ be a secure PRG. Prove or disprove that the following construction also yields a secure PRG. $$G'(k) = G(k||0),$$ where $||$ denotes the concatenation of two ...
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### RSA 896 vs 1024 vs 2048 in Javascript?

I am currently working on a secure messaging website and I had been using RSA 2048 for encryption, decryption and signing of messages but I found it to be EXTREMELY LAGGY so i've moved to 1024. I did ...
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### Can you give me an example of any PKC encrytion algorithm with coins?

I'm reading a Definition of Public Key Encryption and here say: ... Enc is a (possibly) probabilistic polynomial time encryption algorithm which takes as input a public key $pk$, a $m\in M$ and ...
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### McEliece Public Key Encryption

The definition of Public Key Encryption(PKE) say that: A PKE scheme is a triple of probabilistic polynomial time algorithm (PPT) (Gen,Enc,Dec). The definition of PPT say: In complexity ...
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### What are the pros and cons of deterministic site-specific password generation from a master pass?

I've been reading up a bit on deterministic password generators. All the ones I can find basically do something like this: Pick a master username and a master passphrase. The username could be your ...
10k views

### Should we MAC-then-encrypt or encrypt-then-MAC?

Most of the time, when some data must be encrypted, it must also be protected with a MAC, because encryption protects only against passive attackers. There are some nifty encryption modes which ...
242 views

### Can ECB mode really leak some characters?

In an Ars Technica article about Adobe's use of 3DES in ECB mode, there's a paragraph The passwords, according to password expert Steve "Sc00bz" Thomas, are encrypted in a mode known as ECB. That ...
82 views

### randomly generated key reused with XOR

If I have a long randomly generated key (k), XORed with a message (m), but since the message is longer than the key, there is a chance of reusing the keystream with the same message, but the key is ...
104 views

### In Elgamal, the generator g is always quadratic non-residue modulo p where p is a safe prime and inverse of g can be also generator?

In Elgamal, the generator $g$ is always quadratic non-residue modulo $p$, where $p$ is a safe prime and the inverse of $g$ can also be generator? Can I prove it? I can't come up with it at all.
82 views

### Factoring large numbers

I am trying to factor few integers that are each between 115 and 135 digits long. I have just, little over a month ago, began my study of Cryptography. I was wondering if anyone knew of any efficient ...
19k views

### How secure is AES-256?

The cipher AES-256 is used among other places in TSL/SSL across the Internet. It's considered among the top ciphers. In theory it's not crackable since the combinations of keys are massive. Although ...
170 views

### How to use HMAC-SHA1, HMAC-SHA2 in conjunction with AES

I understand how to compute HMAC-SHA1, HMAC-SHA2 etcetera. Please explain why/how is the resulting HMAC value is used in conjunction with AES for encryption/decryption and signing/verifying. In ...
57 views

### secret sharing of product of 2 numbers

Does evaluating the products of shares $a_jb_j$ give a secret sharing of $ab$? I think it's a no, but I am not sure on how to prove it.
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### What is the difference between exhaustive search and factorization in relationship to determining a key?

It seems to me an exhaustive search would simply try to use all the possible bit combinations of a key, while factorization is some mathematical formula for determining the key? When discussing the ...
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### Is there a developer's resource that ties encryption methods and strengths to the appropriate usage scenarios?

I'm not looking necessarily for implementations in any language (although it would help to list those resources as well), but what I am most interested in is a discussion of what advantages and ...
314 views

### Using a Hash as a secure PRNG

I was just looking at some NIST PRNG recommendations, specifically at Hash_DRBG. I read briefly through the algorithm, and even though it is not overly complex, it still seems unnecessary to me. I ...
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 ...
135 views

### What are the security effects of reusing a public RSA key to encrypt large data by blocks? [duplicate]

I'm trying to figure out a way to do public key encryption on a very large piece of data. For this, I of course want one side to do the encrypting but is unable to decrypt the data, and the other ...
83 views

### Verify Messages to Embedded Device

I'm building an embedded device that I plan on distributing. Periodically the device will poll my server to check for updates and commands. I'd like the device to verify that any messages(JSON strings ...
188 views

### Alice's forgetful banking

Alice has a bank account number, but has forgotten which bank it is for. There are 4 banks, run by Bob, Carlos, David, and Eve. She could find out by going to all of the banks and asking if they have ...
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 ...
282 views

### A block cipher with independent keys for each round

I want to modify a standard block cipher in the following way. I replace each round key by a key picked at random. Is this block cipher as secure as the original one ? Thank you. EDIT Some missing ...
123 views

### plaintext and its encrypted version known [duplicate]

I have a (long) text in two versions, encrypted and plaintext. I think it was encrypted using a substitution cipher method (I'm pretty sure, indeed). I'm not good in this matter, I know little about ...
192 views

### How can I accomplish Key Derivation in JavaScript?

I need to take a potentially weak user password and derive a strong key for AES encryption in JavaScript. How can I do this? I expect the hardest problem is generating a good random salt - perhaps an ...
97 views

### Are there any Javascript CSPRNGs?

I'm writing some software that requires the use of a CSPRNG with javascript for use in the browser and I'm wondering what libraries are available. Crypto-js doesn't seem to have a CSPRNG I can ...
76 views

### Serpent cipher : Osvik S-Boxes confusion and test vectors

I'm having hard time with the implementation of the S-Boxes by Osvik found in this paper: Speeding up Serpent. At the end of the paper, all the s-boxes are given and then, I just implement them. ...
140 views

### HMAC vs Encrypted Hash

What is best to use (for message integrity) between… AES(Data) + HMAC(Data) AES(Data + HMAC(Data)) AES(Data + Hash(Data)) …and why?
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### Why does CBC-MAC need prefix-free inputs to be a good PRF?

In the FFX spec, there is a note about using CMAC as the round function. Security notes. The round function F is constructed in such a way that the set of inputs on which the CBC-MAC is ...
1k views

### What is the recommended replacement for MD5?

Since MD5 is broken for purposes of security, what hash should I be using now for secure applications?
162 views

### If I have the unencrypted text and the encrypted text, can I calculate the key?

If I have the unencrypted text and the encrypted text, can I calculate the key? It seems logical based on my limited knowledge of encryption that I should be able to... but it also seems like too ...
81 views

### Question about the definition of a perfect cipher

I need to prove that the following encryption scheme is a perfect cipher: Let $p$ be a prime. The secret key is a pair $(a,b)$ sampled uniformly at random from $\mathbb{Z}_p^* \times \mathbb{Z}_p$. ...
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### Password as it relates to various encryption schemes

Suppose you have 2 drives you want to encrypt using different encryption algorithms, as an example: AES256 and Twofish. I am aware that using the same password for both could potentially weaken ...
55 views

### Public Key encryption /Assymetric encryption

For a start, I 've got a question regarding the Public key encryption. I know the public key encryption overcomes the Key distribution issue with the symmetric encryption and that in the case of ...
61 views

### How would you encrypt-then-MAC when using pen-and-paper and a Caesar cipher?

I'll probably get shot for asking this, but I've got some kids (aged 8-10) in my neighbourhood that I've been showing/teaching the simple pen-and-paper Caesar cipher and they're successfully playing ...
126 views

### Derive a public EC key from two public EC keys

Alice has two EC key pairs: $a_1$, $a_2$ are private keys (integers), $A_1$, $A_2$ are the corresponding public keys (points). Alice and Bob want to create a new public key $C$. Alice must prove that ...
28 views

### Hash of multiset of values, which lets me compute the hash of the union

Cryptographic hash functions normally take as input a bitstring. I am looking for a hash function that takes as input a finite multiset of values. In other words, given $S \subset \{0,1\}^*$, I want ...
51 views

### How is digital signature different from a message authentication code (MAC)?

I know the definitions of both but can't specifically tell how they are different and if one is better than the other. Please help.
134 views

### How to Distribute the Shares using Secret Sharing for arbitrary Monotone Access Structures

Consider 4 people, $A$,$B$,$C$,$D$, & a secret $s\in\{0,1\}^k$. Construct a scheme which enables the following subsets of people to retrieve the secret $\{A,B\}$, $\{A,C\}$, $\{B,C,D\}$. I know ...
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### Cryptanalysis and weaknesses of SEED cipher

I've discovered that a client has SEED enabled in their SSL ciphers, and would like to know a bit more about it from a security perspective. The Wikipedia article doesn't mention any flaws, yet I've ...
90 views

### How to calculate entropy of a combined key

I know how to calculate the entropy of a key that relates to its selection process. For example if the key space is 1000, entropy of a randomly chosen key is 1000. Suppose now you have two keys $X$ ...
177 views

### Attacking 2DES efficiently

Meet in the middle on 2DES uses $2^{56}$ memory. Given the fact that the attacker has only $2^{45}$ memory. How can the attacker adjust the attack so even with this memory limit, it will still be more ...
756 views

### Duration for attacking Two-Key Triple-DES Encryption using all RAM ever built?

I am considering attacks on Two-Key Triple-DES Encryption assuming $2^{32}$ known plaintext/ciphertext pairs (that's a mere 32 Giga Bytes of ciphertext) by the method devised by Paul C. van Oorschot ...
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### Endless PRNG from PRNG with specific stretch?

Every definition of pseudorandom generator that I've seen says it takes n-bit strings and gives poly(n)-bit strings. Is there a proof that if there is such a pseudorandom generator then there is a ...
106 views

### Definition of a CSPRNG

I am interested in what conditions are necessary and sufficient to define a cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generator (CSPRNG). Wikipedia lists two defining characteristics: It ...