# All Questions

121 views

### Why would cryptography fall apart if there were a finite number of primes? [closed]

I vaguely know that prime numbers are very important in cryptography, but I assume for most encryption methods, they tend to stay rather 'small'. Are we really using massive prime numbers for ...
219 views

### How does ccrypt work?

On many Linux/GNU distributions CCrypt (ccrypt) by Peter Selinger is available as a command line utility to encrypt files. How does the protocol work and is it ...
1k views

### Calculation of time needed to crack DES with my CPU

I have a laptop that has the CPU and the RAMs shown below in the images. My question is that, using this CPU and the RAMs, how much time would it take for me to crack an old school DES algorithm ...
13k views

### Twofish vs. Serpent vs. AES (or a combo)

I've seen some posts and info online, but they are from 2009, 2010, 2011 or 2012, which is 3-6 years ago, which is a very long time. So I'm looking for an up-to-date answer about which of these is the ...
158 views

### How obvious is it to decrypt numerics encrypted with a reused one time pad?

For instance say you encrypt text using the one time pad and you end up with some scrambled text that appears illegible. If you reused the key for multiple times for enough text, someone could ...
164 views

### How does $g$ being a generator imply Diffie-Hellman's correctness?

In the Diffie-Hellman protocol for key exchange over an unsecured channel, we choose $p$ and $g$, where $g$ is a generator of $\mathbf{Z}_p^*$. However I want to know why this assumption makes the ...
683 views

### Differences between Work Factor and Time Complexity

I am interested to know if work factor means the same thing as time complexity. Quoting Work Factor : Uncovering keys in cryptosystems The Work Factor of a cryptosystem is related to its key-...
102 views

### Would the Fiat Shamir identification scheme be more secure if I design it with an exponents higher than 2?

Let's say both Prover and Verifier would use nth power instead of 2nd when creating public keys and when verifying. I know it would slow it down but would that cause the protocol to be more secure?
91 views

I am currently working on my diploma project, a high security NFC door lock and need to exchange very sensible data. That's why I thought of PGP encryption, which is as far as I know one of the ...
122 views

### What would a backdoor in symmetric key cipher look like? [duplicate]

Pretty much what the title says. DES was suspected of having one, but I couldn't imagine what it could possibly look like if only the NSA knew how to use it. Dual_EC_DRBG's backdoor is asymmetric, but ...
169 views

### What are the well known protocols that offer perfect forward secrecy? [closed]

As far as I know these are the well known protocols that offer PFS TLS/SSL (with DHE-RSA, DHE-DSS, ECDHE-RSA or ECDHE-ECDSA) SSH (RFC4253) OTR (Protocol Version 3 Spec) IPsec (with IKEv1 and IKEv2) ...
412 views

### Drawback of ElGamal encryption

I am trying to find out some disadvantages of ElGamal cryptography but I'm not able to figure out what's wrong with the algorithm. The only one I found is that a known-plain text attack is possible in ...
382 views

### Multiple keys for the same ciphertext [duplicate]

Say you have a plain text: How are you today? and you encrypt it so it becomes: LKD03Loel03skj1Q03 Now you have multiple people that need to know the plain text of this cipher text but ...
570 views

### ccrypt and its security

I would like to know how secure is ccrypt to encrypt files (like images, videos and other non-plain text data) using single password of 20+ chars length. It uses Rijndael with 256-bit block size and ...
114 views

### GCM implementation

I want to write GCM implementation myself (only for research purposes). So far, I have successfully written CTR implementation (for AES), but now I ran into few problems with GCM. If I'm not wrong, ...
233 views

### How does knowing the factorization of N help to obtain the secret?

Assuming $x=a^2 \pmod n$ and knowing $x$, $p$, $q$ how is it possible to obtain $a$?
105 views

### Is this JS library using openssl genrsa -rand improperly?

pem, a JS wrapper around openssl, has the following code in it: var params = ['genrsa', '-rand', '/var/log/mail:/var/log/messages', keyBitsize ]; Am ...
79 views

### Exponentiation with fully homomorphic encryption [duplicate]

I have often heard that because a fully homomorphic encryption scheme allows for both additions and multiplications on encrypted data, most other operations can be simulated. I don't understand how ...
209 views

### Standard serialization format for libsodium-based messages

Does anyone know of a standardized serialization format which can be (or already is) widely used for encrypted messages? For a variety of reasons (mostly complexity, age and poor support across a lot ...
398 views

### Are there any known weaknesses with ElGamal algorithm?

I am working on a messaging system and plan to use ElGamal asymmetric encryption to protect the message contents during storage and transmission. (This would be in addition to TLS used during ...
106 views

### Send an encrypted question and return answer without decryption

Oke bear with me for a minute. Once upon a time someone mentioned a hypothetical way where you would send an encrypted question to Google and Google would return an answer without decrypting it. As ...
97 views

### Hashes and Ciphers [closed]

So I'm brand new to cryptography, I'm confused on a few fundamental issues, and my normal avenues of research aren't bearing any fruit. I'm hoping someone can describe the relationship between ...
161 views

### Vigenere ciphers : Need help for math analysis

I've been learning about Vigenere ciphers and then thought of another method to Encrypt and decrypt that. This's my method to encrypt : ...
722 views

### decrypt numbers multiplied by a certain floating point number

A friend has about 10K numbers in a an excel sheet. He wanted to encrypt these numbers in order to share the file with a 3rd party that will help him reorganize the tables. What he did, to hide the ...
440 views

### Why can the last block contain a full block of padding in CBC Encryption?

I'm trying to understand the SSL Poodle Attack and I'm wondering why the last block of a CBC Record can be full of padding? Wouldn't that mean that the useful data was already a multiple of the key ...
836 views

### Why are the outputs of the md5sum tool and Crypto++'s MD5 different?

Could you please tell me what is the difference of coreutils' md5sum and sha*sum tools (...
3k views

### Multiple private keys for single public key

I am currently working in security in mobile ad-hoc networks. I have several clusters, and I want to send some data encrypted with its public key, from the cluster head to the cluster members. I ...
290 views

### PBKDF2 for login key, scrypt for encryption key

I need to derive two keys from a single password client side. One for in-browser login, the other for encryption. Is the following secure ? ...
183 views

### Why is C_digest defined in PKCS#11?

Digesting doesn't require any key and can be performed on the client side. Why does the PKCS#11 token interface standard have a C_digest method? For example, why should I send my data to a PKCS11 HSM ...
117 views

### What aspect of elliptic curve encryption paradigms makes them especially susceptible to quantum based attack algorithms?

This was a statement made during a talk at today's DFN-CERT conference but unfortunately it wasn't explained further. Can anyone shed light on why elliptic curves are susceptible to quantum based ...
484 views

### How to choose an algorithm

I have some understanding of Cryptography and I would like to know if there is a tool or website to help me choose an algorithm based on my own needs (I'm being vague in purpose). I'm looking for a ...
58 views

### Reduction of a modular exponentiation's base does not change the result

Can anyone help me to prove this property used in the RSA correctness theorem? $a^b\bmod{n}\equiv (a\bmod{n})^b\bmod{n}$ Specifically, here is what I have done: this is what i mean. i can't ...
181 views

### RSA Key composition

I'm trying to figure out how it is composed the RSA key. Follow what I know : For a RSA 2048, 2048 is the bit length of the module. The public key is composed by $(e,M)$ when $e$ is the public ...
149 views

### ECDSA Public key randomness

If I have a 256bit ECDSA public key how likely is it that the same public key will be generated by another person. Will it take on average 2^256 tries to generate same public key? If I xor the first ...
4k views

### AES GCM vs other encryption modes in embedded environment for network traffic

I'm doing a lot of research since I'm doing an internship for a company where I need to upgrade their security level. Their own protocol needs a cryptographic upgrade and I'm leaning towards AES since ...
117 views

167 views

### Is the result of HMAC-sha256 distinguishable from random noise?

Is if the result of HMAC-sha256 distinguishable from random noise? If so, given: a collection of 1000 keys, and 1000 messages of random noise, 100 signed by each of only 10 of those keys Can ...
213 views

### Reducing size of hash function

If I have some data I hash with SHA256 as hash=SHA256(data) and then copy only the first 8 bytes of the hash instead of the whole 32 bytes. How easy is it to find a ...
231 views

### AES ECB experiment

Generally speaking, ECB mode shouldn't be used. ECB seems to be more of a basic building block than anything else. Because I thought it would be interesting to experiment with encryption (this method ...
118 views

### Schnorr's identication protocol

Schnorr's identification protocol is said to be a honest verifier zero knowledge protocol. Does it imply it will not work if the verifier is dishonest? I'm wondering if this is the case, it would ...
184 views

### Zero Knowledge Non Interactive Proof with random oracle

I am trying to write an assay about Non Interactive Zero-Knowledge proofs and would like to take the simple discrete logarithm problem example fallowing the Feige-Fiat-Shamir heuristics. I understand ...
166 views

### Linear Recurrence, keystreams, and periods

I am trying to understand the following problem: Consider the following linear recurrence over $Z_2$ of degree four: $z_{i+4} = (z_{i+3} + z_{i+2} + z_{i+1} + z_{i}) \bmod 2$ i >= 0. ...
77 views

### Hill Cipher the point of a known plaintext attack question

Is the point of a known plaintext attack on a Hill Cipher to get the matrix key?