# All Questions

108 views

### Do both client and server need to implement OpenSSL protections to protect from CBC attacks

In regards to the protections implemented in OpenSSL 0.9.6d (described in section 2. http://www.openssl.org/~bodo/tls-cbc.txt). My understanding is that the mechanism prepends an empty record when ...
123 views

### Can you explain the counter in the Key derivation function of PACE?

I try to understand the PACE-Protocol, especially the Key Derivation Function in ECDH on page 33. Can someone explain me, what the Counter is good for? Often there are iteration counters in KDF - but ...
121 views

### 2PC Private Set Intersection Optimized for asymmetrically sized sets

I am researching some concepts of practical 2 party computation and was curious if anyone could point me to a research paper that is focused on private set intersection where one party has a very ...
123 views

### Would data be secure if a cryptographically secure PRNG was used for encryption?

For example, say you have a client and server. You use asymmetric encryption to securely deliver two seeds from server to client. Each user then seeds two PRNGs (one for incoming data, one for ...
122 views

### Cryptographic Arithmetic Toolbox/Software [closed]

This term I have many cryptography courses treating finite fields. I was wondering if there is any good software that could help doing basic operations in galois fields etc. I already googled but ...
185 views

### Off-the-record communication

Is my protocol correct? For fun, I tried to design a protocol that would allow off-the-record communication. I'm not sure it works, I have a feeling there might be a problem with it that I'm not ...
151 views

### How is a PRNG used in the PGP?

I'm currently reading up on the components of PGP and I am wondering what exactly the PRNG is used for. PGP uses ANSI X9.17 and entropy from a users keystrokes to generate a temporary key. So, is ...
140 views

### Upper bound Linear Feedback Shift Register

It is clear that when we have any output stream $x_0,x_1,...$ produced by linear feedback shift register than this output has to be periodic. Now I was wondering if we can find an upper bound for ...
245 views

### Is this new server API authentication protocol secure?

I need a secure protocol to authenticate client side users with my server which has an API. I am devising something more secure particularly to resist active MITM attacks where an attacker may modify ...
156 views

### Authentication of machine before installation (to stop piracy) [closed]

I have a web-software project which needs a bit of protection in form of authencitation… This web based software runs on an intranet. There is no access to the internet from these terminal machines. ...
92 views

### hybrid PKE scheme CCA2 insecurity

I'm reading "An Efficient CCA2-Secure Variant of the McEliece Cryptosystem in the standard model" by Rastaghi which states: As we know, in hybrid PKE schemes XOR alone cannot perfectly hide ...
193 views

### Decryption or attacking DES encrypted file

I have a file that has been encrypted using DES and am looking to decrypt and find a secret message encoded. All I have is the file which is full of binary data. There is no key or anything else which ...
567 views

### How can an encryption scheme be indistinguishable with multiple messages but vulnerable to an adaptive chosen-plaintext attack?

In order to be indistinguishable with respect to multiple messages, wouldn't the scheme need to be nondeterministic? How would this then possibly be vulnerable to an adaptive CPA?
78 views

### How to pass an arbitrary signature to a certificate

I am trying to sign certificate (X509) using secret sharing. That is shareholders combine their signatures to produce the final signature which will be in this case the signed certificate. However ...
159 views

### 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 ...
1k views

### How are IVs used in association with RSA Encryption?

How are IVs used in association with RSA Encryption? Can someone explain why we use them in this RSA context?
365 views

### Why does Merkle's Puzzle requires Eve quadratic complexity of effort to break the system?

The way Applied cryptography 2ED explains the puzzle is as follows (I paraphrase it): Bob generates 2^20 messages of the form x,y where ...
297 views

### Are there attacks that break collision resistance but not preimage resistance?

Are there any examples of attacks on hash functions which: break collision resistance and second preimage resistant, or break collision resistance and preimage resistant? I have looked at ...
226 views

### In RSA, what is faster attacking “d” when plaintext is known, or factoring when M is unknown?

I'm aware of two methods to attack RSA: Brute force factoring, where no plain text is available Brute force (1/e) mod φ where the plain text is available as described here Question Given an ...
52 views

### How can I evaluate the congruency of an AKS primality test?

Despite the fact primality test is a mathematical issue, it plays a part on the security of many cryptosystems such as RSA. I was trying to understand how it works until I came to the following ...
2k views

### DES Key Schedule Algorithm

Reading through the DES Specification it says that the keys are permuted with PC-1 initially and then shifted left both $C$ and $D$. However, before it gets ...
357 views

### Is SHA-256 a one way permutation when restricting the domain to {0,1}^256? [duplicate]

Suppose we consider the space of $\lbrace 0,1 \rbrace^{256}$ as the domain and SHA-256 as our hash function. Does SHA-256 become a one way permutation? Has anyone tried to prove this? Or can it be ...
264 views

171 views

### The Goldreich-Goldwasser-Micali Construction with bad PRGS

I understand that if we have a secure PRG then the Goldreich-Goldwasser-Micali construction gives us a secure PRF. However, what I've not been able to find much material on is how will the GGM ...
375 views

### Verifying Self-signed SSL Client Certificates

I have a service and I want to authenticate my clients using SSL client certificates. Now I want the key exchange process to be as simple as possible, kind of like SSH: You generate a keypair and ...
72 views

### How are the lower levels calculated using upper levels in an optimized Merkel Hash Tree?

I was reading about the TIK protocol for thwarting wormhole attacks on adhoc networks. It uses a Merkel Hash Tree to store keys. But since the number of keys can be large, the tree is optimized by ...
271 views

### Generating keys with HKDF from Diffie Hellman agreement

In order to generate multiple session keys from a Diffie Hellman key agreement protocol, I'm trying to use the HKDF to generate this session keys. The HKDF algorithm uses an Extraction-Expand ...
182 views

### Privately Sum Values without Dealers, MPC

Suppose $n$ actors each hold a plaintext $p_i$. We wish to find $\sum p_i$, without leaking any information about individual $p_i$. Any actor (or any link in the network) could be controlled by an ...
182 views

### Can you help me understand PFS and wPFS?

Every time I encounter the concepts of PFS (perfect forward secrecy) and wPFS (weak perfect forward secrecy), I feel uncertain about them. My understanding is that: PFS ensures that, if the ...
171 views

### Security of S/MIME in case of CA compromise

Suppose Alice and Bob are exchanging messages using S/MIME, protected by certificates that have been issued by either the same CA or by two mutually independent CAs. There exists an adversary Mallory ...
106 views

### Where can I double check my elliptic curve results?

I am trying to do some elliptic curve calculations by hand, just to refresh myself on how the system works. I calculated some points and did some operations by hand. I am trying to double check my ...
176 views

### SHA256 Round Equivalence

I have calculated the average number of operations in 1 round of SHA256 as follows: Additions: 9.25 Bitwise Rotations: 9 Bitwise Shifts: 1.5 Bitwise AND: 5 Bitwise XOR: 10 I have certain ...
991 views

### Achieving 256-bit encryption strength with PBKDF2 - HMAC-SHA1

I am interested in the theoretical consideration of the bit strength of an encryption key and its precursor. Assume a given environment as follows: a. My encryption algorithm is AES-256 b. My key ...
207 views

### Is generating public key inevitably slow in classic Diffie-Hellman if the private key is large?

Let's say I pick a 3000+ bit prime $p$ for which I also know that $q = (p - 1) / 2$ is a prime. If I've understood correct, then I can pick pretty much any $g$. Is generating $g^x$ now inevitably ...
148 views

### using random encrypted RSA challenge as key material

Assume a simple protocol for authentication - one side sends a randomly generated challenge string and encrypts it with RSA. The receiver decrypts it and replies with a hash of the challenge, proving ...
150 views

### 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 ...
574 views

### Review of AES encryption concept for an open source project

i'm working on an opensource project, A generator for static (html/js), password protected photo galleries. The generator AES 256 encrypts many images with the same key in PyCrypto, and decrypt them ...
380 views

### Asymmetric format preserving encryption?

I would like to encrypt a string asymmetrically. I would like the ciphertext to be as short as as plaintext. (or shorter) I've read about format preserving encryption functions - are there ...
2k views

### Creating a PKCS#12 file where public key doesn't match the private key

For testing purpose, I want to create a PKCS#12 file in which the private key doesn't match the certificate. Is there any tool which will help me do this? If I use ...
214 views

### Is this ECC encryption key sharing method okay?

Is this encryption key sharing okay to use? Or is much better to use ECIES? $G$ = base point $a$ = Alice’s private key $b$ = Bob’s private key $A = aG$ = Alice’s public key $B = bG$ = Bob’s public ...
192 views

### Generate a new public/private key pair for each new message?

When using PGP type public encrypted communication, would it be a good idea to generate a new public for each message and attach that in the new public key in the reply to back to sender mail body? ...
148 views

### Using plain Diffe-Hellman for server authentication with known public key

Other considerations aside, is it possible to use DH with an established public key (together with fixed g, p, q) to safely authenticate a server instead of using some signing algorithm? In other ...
196 views

### Proof of work for determining whether a number is prime?

I have an idea for a system that would be outsourcing some brute force calculations to many users in hopes of finding divisors of a number. However, there is a possibility that a given number would be ...
554 views

### How are Predicate Encryption algorithms implemented?

After a lot of reading on the internet, i can't seem to figure out how Predicate Encryption works. As i read, it consists of 4 algorithms: ...
361 views

### inverse problem about scalar multiplication on elliptic curve

Let $E$ be an elliptic curve over a finite field $F_p$. Given $n$ be a positive integer and $Q$ be a point on $E$, assume that $Q=nP$, how can we find this $P$? We can assume that $n|p-1$. If $n$ is ...
1k views

### AES encryption with multiple keys

I would like to encrypt some data using a combination of multiple keys. There would be two keys: a client keys that would be generated for each client and a single server/application key used by ...
247 views

### How does the birthday attack work in AUTH and UF-CMA games?

In the AUTH and UF-CMA games, an adversary is required to forge a ciphertext or message/tag pair to win the game. Given an encryption scheme $E$ and a PRF $F$, let $\hat{E} = C || F_k(C)$ and \$C = ...
218 views

### Is Functional Encryption about Access Control over encrypted data alone?

Informally, In functional encryption system , a decryption key allows a user to learn a function of the encrypted data. But all i see is that the function acts as an access control over the data. ...