# All Questions

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### What are the consequences of not checking the server mac in a TLS connection?

The context for this question (it's quite involved) can be found in this document: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B15itpMWb2ztWTJrYTgzX204OVU However, I want to make it clear that you don't have to ...
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### Python KDF - Master Key and Derivatives

The encrypted file can be opened by following combinations (either any 2 DK, or 1 MK): DK1 + DK2 DK1 + DK3 DK2 + DK3 DK1 + DK2 + DK3 MK Any heads-up with Python ...
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### Is a collision attack possible on MD5 if message is known partially

Is it possible to find $m'$ such that $\operatorname{MD5}(m'||m_1)=\operatorname{MD5}(m_1||m_2)$ if I know $m_2$ and $\operatorname{MD5}(m_1||m_2)$? Is this a collision or a preimage attack? Also in ...
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### What functions allow for practical indistinguishability obfuscation?

Recently, there has been a major theoretical breakthrough in program obfuscation, in the area of indistinguishability obfuscation. Background: Indistinguishability obfuscation is a form of program ...
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### FHE - Brakerski's “Scale Invariant” Scheme

I thought the current state of the art for fully homomorphic encryption was Brakerski, Gentry and Vaikuntanathan's scheme (BGV) based on standard/ring LWE employing modulus switching for noise ...
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### How realistic is a dictionary attack on a secure remote password protocol (SRP) verifier?

I'm deploying a secure remote password protocol implementation and I'm wondering what the consequences are when the client generated verifier gets leaked to an attacker. I've read Thomas Wu's paper ...
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### Homomorphic Encryption - Smart Vercauteren Batching

I'm going through Smart and Vercauteren's paper "Fully Homomorphic SIMD operations" and had a question about some notation used in the paper. In section 2 of the above it is stated that for each ...
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### Brute force RSA cracking

Suppose one had a complete list of primes up to $2^{n+1}-1$. Then wouldn't one be able to crack an $n$-bit RSA public key in time $O(\pi(2^{n+1}-1))$, making RSA insecure? Thanks, René
227 views

### Why must IV be sent with each packet?

I was reading about Encrypt-then-MAC and everywhere I go it seems people include the IV with the ciphertext generated for each message then MAC that and send all the information concatenated. Why do ...
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### Is ”generating transcripts that are indistinguishable from actual messages in a signature scheme” not universal forgery?

In the Pointcheval paper “Security arguments for digital signatures and blind signatures”, they have proved the security of Schnorr signature for existential forgery under adaptively chosen-message ...
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### Comparing two values without revealing them

Suppose Alice wants to prove to Bob that t1 is less than t2. t1 and ...
280 views

### BigInteger in Java and Randomness

I'm looking for some PRNGs and – as I have been using Java for a long period of time – I thought that the BitInteger class, together with the ...
191 views

### Universal Circuits in Indistinguishability Obfuscation Candidate Construction

I am currently working on an implementation of the candidate construction for an indistinguishability obfuscator that was recently proposed by Garg et al. The relevant paper can be found here. ...
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### Does this protocol provide Perfect Forward Secrecy / are there potential security flaws?

We have a HMAC key (128 bit/16 bytes) an AES key (128 bit/16 bytes) an AES IV (128 bit/16 bytes) a random salt (128 bit/16 bytes) Each packet is signed with a HMAC (SHA256) After each packet is ...
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### Value of “counter” when decrypting AES in CTR mode?

If – when using AES in CTR mode – you decide to use the setup where you combine the IV and the block count value into a single value, as suggested here, the first 12 bytes are your IV and the last 4 ...
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### Message lengths with AES CTR mode?

Im working on my own AES implementation as a personal educational exercise (not for production use), and a book im using as a resource states: In the case of CTR, we are merely XORing the output ...
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### What is the difference between authenticating and signing a document?

Authenticating a document means to verify it is from the sender. But it seems like signing a document also verifies it’s from the sender. What exactly is the relationship or difference between ...
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### What are the standard procedures in cryptanalysis to analyze unknown ciphertext?

What are the "standard procedures in cryptanalysis" to analyze unknown ciphertext? In other words: Are there any protocols, officially acknowledged checklists or something like that which represent a ...
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### ECDSA: Retrieving non-random k [duplicate]

I have a question regarding the random $k$ number of ECDSA encryption. As far as I know, it is possible to retrieve $k$ (and thus the private key) from two signed messages if both used the same $k$. ...
564 views

### Mixing Entropy Sources by XOR?

Assume that I have two sources of entropy (say, a hardware RNG and a CSPRNG) and that the two sources are independent (do not know anything about the internal state of the other RNG). Can I mix them ...
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### How can a digital signature algorithm incorporate a random data if it is to be authenticated on a separate system

I am trying to understand how RSA digital signatures can incorporate any data from a PRNG into the final signature. Does this mean that separate implementations might fail to verify each others ...
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### Break double encryption

Let $E_k$ : {0,1}$^l$ be a block cipher encryption function with block-size $l$ and key-length $n$. In class, we saw that a double encryption with two independent keys $E{}'_{k_1k_2}(x)$ = ...
455 views

### Prove that textbook RSA is susceptible to a chosen ciphertext attack

Given a ciphertext $y$, describe how to choose a ciphertext $\hat{y} \neq y$, such that knowledge of the plaintext $\hat{x}=d_K(\hat{y})$ allows $x=d_k(y)$ to be computed. So I use the fact that the ...
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### Is OAEP reversible?

Given nothing more than some integer $m =$ OAEP($M$), is it possible to recover the original plaintext $M$? In other words, without being given the hash functions or the random string used for ...
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### Which areas in CS will be (or have been) most affected by fully homomorphic cryptography? [closed]

I'm in the middle of planning a 5000ish word essay on fully homomorphic cryptography, the current practical implementations and their limitations. Which areas of CS as a subject have been (or will ...
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### Probability for collisions of a one-way compression function

Given a one-way compression function $h:\{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}^m$ and an attacker that picks $x_1 \ldots x_t \in \{0,1\}^n$ (uniformly distributed), I have to show that the probability to find ...
I am having difficulty solving part (ii) of Excercise 5.17 from Becker's Cipher Systems. Exercise 5.17 $\quad$If $f(x),g(x)$ are any two polynomials over $GF(2)$ with $f(0)=g(0)=1$ show that ...