# All Questions

210 views

### Can Secp 256 K1 curves “map” to a value on FIPS 186-3 or P-256?

I'm looking at Secp 256K1 vs UProve's FIPS 186-3 or P-256 implementation. Is there any relationship between the curves such that I can consistently "map" or "project" values from one curve to ...
57 views

### RSA Proof - di-mgt - modulo properties

I´m trying to follow one of the very detailed RSA Proofs given by di-mgt: "RSA theory", but unfortunately I stuck at the beginning of solution (chapter 3). I don´t understand where the second part ...
224 views

### Encoding numbers that can be decoded mentally?

I have a lot of objects, all of which need a particular number tagged on them so I can quickly tell the customer accordingly. But the problem is that the customer should not know what these numbers ...
184 views

### Encryption algorithms and the “One-Time pad” [duplicate]

I am not well versed in the field but I believe I know the basics. All encryption algorithms that I know of utilize direct data manipulation to encrypt a message (string of bits) such as shifting, ...
347 views

### How do we prove that AES, DES etc. are secure?

How do we prove that AES, DES etc. are secure? I've read about them and know the basics on how they work, but I still don't quite understand how we can be sure they are secure? What are the proofs?
205 views

### Re-using parts of a one time pad to encrypt a new one?

The main problem with OTP's is the fact that they can only be used once. Would it be possible to use a random number that's, say, 512 digits, then use 256 of those for the (non-random) message, the ...
197 views

### how to mathematically prove a key exchange algorithm [closed]

I want to know the basic methodology that can be used to prove that a key exchange algorithm is secure. I am not asking about any specific algorithm. I want to know what should be proven and how to ...
215 views

### Shamir's Secret Share [duplicate]

I'm not quite sure the benefits of working over a prime modulus in Shamir's secret share- but doesn't limiting the numbers you pull from make the secret easier to guess? Instead of being over the real ...
327 views

### Dual_EC_DRBG and OpenSSL on a Mac

Since there is not much info anywhere on the Internet related to this: Does anyone know if OpenSSL's default CSPRNG is Dual_EC_DRBG or not? Their wiki is not very clear… Related to the first ...
743 views

### Reusing keys with AES-CBC

I heard that key/IV pairs must not be reused in AES-CTR, or when using any stream cipher for that matter. Yet the attacks described do not seem to apply to AES-CBC. Is reusing the same key several ...
70 views

### what is PFS game?

when i reading about this paper, in the Setup of SIM section 5.2, it says that "According to the definition of PFS game", i wonder what the definition of PFS game ...
145 views

### Security of (cryptographic) padding compared to other methods for blockcompletion for block ciphers

As said in the heading, I want to know how the security of different padding methods, e.g. ANSI X.923, ISO 10126 and PKCS7, is compared to other methods to reach the needed block size, like ciphertext ...
538 views

### Break a simple compression function of a cryptographic hash function

I have a very simple compression function, which looks like this in C++: ...
193 views

### Relationship between Elliptic Curve Discrete Log, Integer Discrete Log, and Integer Factorization

I am trying to look into a relation between the following three problems which are widely used to build public crypto systems: Integer Discrete log Elliptic Curve Discrete log Integer Factorization ...
175 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 ...
425 views

### How to supply the GCM authentication tag to the OpenSSL command line tools?

I'm using AES-256-GCM for authenticated encryption. In order to decrypt, the ruby OpenSSL library requires an auth_tag parameter (in addition to the key and iv). ...
123 views

### Does it necessarily mean that an RSA moduli generated with poor randomness is not random?

In 2012 a group of researchers collected a large amount of RSA moduli and calculated their greatest common divisor in order to find common factors between them. By finding a common factor they could ...
360 views

### Derive a key from public data using a secret master key

Users in my system will be given a device that contains a 128-bit AES user key. The user key will be derived from 64 bits of public data related to the user, which is unique but very predictable (i.e. ...
591 views

### Reduction of Integer factorization to Discrete logarithm problem

I was reading Eric Bach paper entitles "Discrete logarithms and factoring", in which he states the following reductions: solving the integer factorization problem suffices to solve the discrete ...
271 views

### How can Alice prove that a message has not been tampered with?

In terms of the usual suspects. The problem I have is that Alice wants to send Bob a message M, which gives Bob permission to perform some actions. However Alice wants to verify, from time to ...
261 views

### What operations are used in symmetric cryptography and why?

In continuation to Why are bitwise rotations used in cryptography?: what other operations are commonly used in symmetric cryptography? Are there particular operations on numbers that are good for ...
1k views

### How long to bruteforce a RSA key [duplicate]

Suppose I have a 2048 bit RSA public key, and want to brute force the corresponding private key. I guess there are 2048^16 possible combinations? How long would this take me to brute force with an ...
95 views

### Prepend information about encryption implementation to the stored data

I want to preface this by saying i will not be using any of this code/information in a live project, this is only for learning/fun (so I welcome some speculation) I was looking at how the PHP crypt() ...
325 views

### How is text converted to a number for RSA? [duplicate]

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_%28algorithm%29#Key_generation the key length is the number of bits in n. So how can a message of many megabytes (millions of bits) be modded by a 1024 ...
217 views

### ECC Point Multiplication of Product

I can calculate $Q = a\,b\,G$ in several ways: $Q = a \, (b \, G)$ or $Q = b \, (a \, G)$. These give the same result, as expected. But if I do $c = (a \, b) \bmod n$ where $a \, b$ is much greater ...
156 views

### Acceptable assumptions when proving security

Considering the output of a cryptographic primitive, like an encryption scheme (CBC, ...), a hash function or even the output of any schemes based on number theoretic assumptions, is it reasonable ...
152 views

### Which keys are necessary to decrypt Application data in a SSL connection?

I'm debugging an application which communicates between client and server using a SSL/TLS connection, and want to capture and analyze the sent data. Are the client write keys and server write keys ...
308 views

### Are there any hand ciphers not obsoleted by computer cryptanalysis? [duplicate]

Computerized cryptanalysis has obviously made formerly "secure" hand ciphers like Playfair, Four Square, and the Hill Cipher obsolete because they can be defeated in seconds. But is there a hand ...
148 views

### Is this a sensible cryptographic protocol intending to reduce the impact of compromised security?

I'm in the process of designing a cryptographic protocol which will reduce the impact an attacker will have if they gained root access to a server storing data. The basic crux of it is that keys ...
266 views

### Designing a security system from scratch with a custom protocol, suggestions needed

For the reasons I cannot go into details, I need to design my own protocol and overall security system which will be used to establish secure data exchange between various devices (most notably ...
322 views

### What does $(\mathbb{Z}_n^*)^2$ mean?

In a paper they write once, $(\mathbb{Z}_n^*)^2$. Is this the group of quadratic residues or is it something else? Here the theorem: Under the strong RSA assumption, given a modulus $n$, along with ...
319 views

### Using the output of a stream cipher, how to guarantee the integrity of 4 bytes of data?

I am designing a simple and secure stream communication protocol. My idea was to build each message sent to the wire as: (message size || clear text || UHASH(message size || clear text)) $\oplus$ ...
125 views

### Connections between Instance Hiding and Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Another approach taken by researchers for carrying out computations over encrypted data is Instance Hiding. In brief, If a user wants to outsource the computation of a function for a particular input ...
102 views

### How to learn the first bit of m in padded RSA

Consider the following version of padded RSA encryption, where encryption of $m$ is done by setting $m′ = (0^k~||~r~||~00000000~||~m)$ for a random $r$ (of length 8 btyes = 64 bits) and then computing ...
203 views

### How secure is passing a MAC to Python's random.seed before using random.choice to generate a MAC?

I'd like to use Python's random.choice seeded with a HMAC-SHA1 tag to generate a MAC encoded in a variable set of chars. ...
408 views

### Does key authentication in SSH protect from MitM?

How do cryptography in SSH(2) work (secure channel establishment, authentication)? Does key authentication in SSH(2) protect from MitM by providing authentication and integrity and why?
480 views

### Proper uses for CTR and CBC AES block cipher modes

Assuming the following: Key is randomly generated is being used (32 bytes+) IV is also randomly generated Crypto random key generator is used Data being encrypted contains common bytes like ...
179 views

### ECKS-PS algorithm: searching in encrypted data; bilinear maps

I have found an encryption algorithm named ECKS-PS (published in the paper Efficient conjunctive keyword search on encrypted data storage system) that allows an user to search in encrypted data. All ...
265 views

### How to make a message into a polynomial on NTRU encryption?

How to make a message into a polynomial on NTRU encryption? for example how we can conver 'hello world' to polynomial... i have read the converting operation on IEEE Std 1363.1- 2008, but i can't ...
182 views

### Sensible usecase for restricting special characters in passwords? [closed]

Please See Why Not Allow Special Characters In a Password on Security. Several websites I've come across limit the allowed special characters for a password. My thought was, it should all be ...
133 views

### Exponentiation In PBC library

I need to compute a function $h^l$, where h is an element of G2 and l is a rational number. How can this be done using the PBC library? I have converted the h to ...
174 views

### Why is Bcrypt called a Key Derivation Function?

I am trying to understand why is bcrypt called a Key Derivation Function? I looked up the details of Ekfblowfish on Usenix article here: ...
3k views

### Simple example for CP-ABE (Ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption)

I'm currently working on Ciphertext Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE). So far I'm only using it with a basic understanding how it actually works. Now I want to understand it a bit better, but ...
156 views

### Why is Blum-Goldwasser not IND-CCA-2 secure?

Consider the Blum-Goldwasser encryption scheme as described on Wikipedia. I was told that it was not IND-CCA-2 secure. I heard there was malleabilty, probably it has to do with XOR-ing. But I do not ...
71 views

### Could use an explanation of the notation for an oracle adversary

In the definition below, what exactly does it mean for the adversary (not even sure that's the correct term?) to equal one? $$\underset{K}{Pr} \left [A^{F_k(\cdot)} = 1 \right ]$$ Source (Page ...
922 views

### AES key/ciphertext space sizes

This is giving me a brain ache now... If I have AES-128, block is 128 bit, then every plaintext (128-bit) can be encrypted to some ciphertext that is also 128-bit. This is the block size. But: 128-bit ...
128 views

### What are unified addition and differential addition in elliptic curve point arithmetic?

A lot of papers use these terms but I do not find a proper explanation of them. Can somebody tell the meaning / difference / intuition / application and if possible with an example.
111 views

### Tell me about non-MD5/SHA1 key fingerprints

I understand there are specifications for public-key fingerprints that use modern hash algorithms like SHA2. What are they?
$E(k_1, pt) = c_1, E(k_2, c_1) = c_2, D(k_{new}, c_2) = pt$, where $k_{new} = f(k_1, k_2).$ Sharing $k_{new}$ and $k_2$ should reveal no information about $k_1$. Clarifications: Being able to ...