# All Questions

176 views

### Lamport-Diffie + Security Proof

I am studying Lamport-Diffie signature scheme. In the lecture present the algorithm $A'$ for attempting to invert the one way function $f$, where $f$ is used to compute the public key. My question is ...
2k views

### Algorithm/Technique for Steganography [closed]

What is the most used Algorithm/Technique in Steganography? I made some research about the algorithm/technique and I think Least Significat Bit(LSB) is the most used algorithm, is there any more ...
1k views

### Is a second preimage attack on MD5 feasible?

What's the practical status of MD5 w.r.t. second-preimage? Integrity of a piece of data is protected by an MD5 hash, itself assumed genuine. The data (and thus the hash) is known to the adversary. ...
443 views

### Why is H(message||secret_key) not vulnerable to length-extension attack?

Given a Merkle-Damgård hash function $H$, I know that an attacker can forge a message protected by a MAC computed as $H(\textrm{secret_key}||\textrm{message})$. Why can't he perform the same ...
371 views

### Does the GCM authentication tag need to be protected?

I am just learning about the GCM mode of AES and I'd like to start using it in my software. However, I have a question about its use. As I understand it the output of a GCM encryption operation is ...
173 views

### How to safely sign a 6 characters String?

I have to decide, whether a document, which I am given, was correctly signed by a private key. my Ideas is to sign the document id using RSA with the private key and to print the following onto the ...
2k views

### How can I remove my personal data from my PGP public key?

According to this Q&A-discussion it is possible to remove all personal data (name and mail address) that is attached to a public key. What steps do I have to follow in order to remove all ...
3k views

### How are primes generated for RSA?

As I understand it, the RSA algorithm is based on finding two large primes (p and q) and multiplying them. The security aspect is based on the fact that it's difficult to factor it back into p and q. ...
88 views

### How to choose the appropriate public (i, m) and private (j, m) keys?

I studied some encryption and decryption and I have found some very interesting problem to solve on the internet. I hope I am writing to right site - there are so many in StackExchange otherwise I ...
521 views

### What does “running in polynomial time” really mean?

I'm currently learning private-key cryptography. I've been able to see that perfect secrecy is achievable if no assumption is made about the computational power of the attacker. However, perfect ...
252 views

### Which encryption method used to crypt this text? [closed]

This is encrypted text: http://pastebin.com/bsHQ3Xvs It starts with <~ and ends with ~> What's the name of this encryption method?
158 views

### Approaches to decoding data of an unknown type [closed]

This is a high level question. One area of computer science that I'm working on getting better at is encoding and decoding data. My background is that of a self-taught web engineer who is trying to ...
775 views

### Okay to use OpenSSL to encrypt then sign a message?

I am planning on encrypting a message then signing the message so the recipient can authenticate the source. Reading this article has me concerned that I'm doing something wrong. My current plan is ...
539 views

### Questions about BCrypt and PBKDF2

I would ask you some questions about users' password storage in a login system. What algorithm do you suggest me to use? bcrypt or PBKDF2? I was looking for a way to implement them client-side and ...
110 views

### Using UMAC with stream cypher

I understand that most stream ciphers, due to being applied with a simple XOR, are specially fragile against data tampering, and must be used with some MAC mechanism. So I am investigating the use of ...
596 views

### What changed in PKCS#1 v2.2, and why?

PKCS#1 is one of the most used (de-facto) standard for real-world use of RSA. That's for good reasons: PKCS#1 is well thought, versatile, understandable, has been relatively stable for over two ...
562 views

First, just to make sure I understand "salting" correctly: You randomly generate a string to append to the password before hashing it, so as to increase its length and make precomputed tables much ...
727 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 ...
194 views

### Why work in a subgroup QR(n) of an RSA group $Z^*_n$?

I sometimes read in papers that a (sub-)group generator $g$ is taken from $\mathrm{QR}(n)$ instead of $\mathbb{Z}^*_n$, where $n = p \cdot q$ and $p$ and $q$ are prime. Is there a reason for this? ...
160 views

### split up sha256 hash and compare indiv block results

We have a h/w accelerator in our SoC and it can do sha256. The restrictions are it's input descriptors (which defines the input packet and len) must not straddle 64K boundary. When it does we can ...
553 views

### Can two cipher letters per plaintext letter easily defeat character frequency analysis?

For a class 5 years ago I wrote a paper about "defeating character frequency analysis by using two cipher letters per plaintext letter" ...
631 views

### Sending TLS messages with out encryption using openssl code

Is it possible to send messages over TLS with out encryption? If so which cipher suite is needed for this?
105 views

### Hardness of CDH in different groups

What is the difference of the CDH problem in different groups? In particular, given a group $\mathbb{G}_1$ of order $q$ that is a subgroup of $\mathbb{Z}_q^*$, $q$ prime, and another group ...
195 views

### How long does it take to extract a key from a FIPS-140 Level 2 device?

How long does it take to extract a key from a FIPS-140 Level 2 device? What records are there of successful extraction? How much did the first extraction from a given device cost? How much would a ...
216 views

### Efficiency of finding sub group order vs factorization

Suppose you got a prime $p = 2\mathbb\Pi_{i=0}^{n-1}q_i+1$, where $2^{k-1} \lt q_i \lt 2^k$ for some $k$ and all $0 \le i \lt n$, and that you also got a generator $g$ of one of the prime order sub ...
291 views

### Ed25519 choice of private key implementation

This answer to another question describes the different values chosen as private key and public key by various Ed25516 implementations. What are the advantages / disadvantages of each? (Table ...
389 views

### Solve a system of non linear equations over GF

I have the following set of equations: $$M_{1}=\frac{y_1-y_0}{x_1-x_0}$$ $$M_{2}=\frac{y_2-y_0}{x_2-x_0}$$ $M_1, M_2, x_1, y_1, x_2, y_2,$ are known and they are chosen from a $GF(2^m)$. I want ...
231 views

### Is the polynomial reconstruction problem really “intractable”?

In the family of the believed (experts haven't come yet with a solution) intractable problems in cryptography belongs the Polynomial Reconstruction problem in which an attacker is given $n$ points in ...
2k views

### How does Scrypt use Salsa?

Bcrypt uses Blowfish to encrypt a derived key from the passphrase, and Blowfish is a cryptographic algorithm, but here it is said that: Note that Salsa20/8 Core is not a cryptographic hash ...
715 views

### Extract private RSA key from USB cryptographic token using Bardou et al. attack (variant of “million message attack”)

There is a side channel attack on tamper-resistant USB cryptographic tokens using padding-oracle, described by Bardou, Focardi, Kawamoto, Simionato, Steel and Tsay, titled "Efficient padding oracle ...
155 views

### Has it become easier to pre-compute tables after MD5 collisions?

Apparently it is not possible to compute all MD5 values from 0x00000000000000000000000000000000 to ...
250 views

### Secret sharing scheme with possibility to change the secret

Here's a scenario I want to handle with a secret sharing scheme: Alice wants to share the secret $S$ with Bob, Charlie and Dave. Alice generates private shares based on $S$ for Bob, Charlie and ...
672 views

### Why is it a security problem that two RSA moduli are not co-prime?

I found this security problem, for example: Alice has an RSA public key: $e = 37$ and $\phi$ (totient, $N_A = (pa-1)(qa-1)$) is $55$, so the key is $(37, 55)$. Bob has an RSA public key: $e = 37$ ...
564 views

### Compare two hashes with different salt

I'm storing the salted hash of a credit card number in a database. What I'd like to be able to do is determine if two different entries in the same database correspond to the same credit card. ...
165 views

### Is my identity exposed when publishing my public key or encrypting with PGP?

Let's say I create my PGP keys with my appropriate name and email address. Will these personal information be exposed if I publish my public key? When I encrypt a message for sending it to my ...
169 views

### Does any public key crypto support and/or allow a 3rd party “control-key”?

My question is based on the following situation: Bob and Alice work for a company that expects them to exchange data encrypted. They could do so using regular public-key cryptography, but Joe (their ...
997 views

### SIMON implementation, decryption issues

I've been trying to implement the new SIMON block cipher in Ruby as a personal challenge. The spec didn't include a pseudocode version of the decryption but I thought I had it figured out. The code I ...
245 views

### Is there any weak message for an ECDSA signature?

Suppose ECDSA is used without hashing the message, but directly using a short message (say 10-bytes long) as the value z (using the definitions at ...
7k views

### AES 256 Encryption - Is it really easy to decrypt if you have the key?

So this might sound like a crazy question but bear with me for a minute. I can't find any info on the internet and so am here, although this might have been a good place to start. I've recently ...
272 views

### Toy encryption system that provides “hints”

I'm looking for a toy encryption system that has a specific property that when decrypting it with a key that is close enough to the key used in the encryption, it will produce some of the original ...
513 views

### Is it possible to actually verify a “sponge function” security claim?

When using a “sponge function” to create a cryptographic hash, we can look at the flat sponge claim, which flattens the claimed success probabilities of all attacks using a single parameter: the ...
199 views

### How can I tell which curve a given ECDSA implementation uses? (P-521 or something else)

I'd like to test and see if certain software uses P-521 ECC curves, or if it uses another variant. Without having access to the sourcecode, or the specification, is there any way for me to test which ...
299 views

### Polynomial multiplication and division in2^128

I want to multiply and divide polynomials, and implement the extended Euclidean algorithm for polynomial greatest common divisors, over a Galois Field of size $2^{128}$. Moreover, I want to use the ...
108 views

### Secure Sketch Construction

I would like a user to choose a point on an image which is represented by (x,y). This is meant to be a security token. When a user uses this location to login they are unlikely to to choose the exact ...
229 views

### How was 256-bit WEP cracked as well?

WEP is now considered as insecure. But how about the 256-bit WEP? Could someone explain why a 256-bit encryption isn't enough? 'A 256-bit WEP system is available from some vendors. As with the other ...
2k views

### AES: keylength and password length? [closed]

What is the difference between the keylength and the length of a password for AES-256?
208 views

Why do people say that using hash twice or more is bad? yes there is key derivation that do that job, but in a low bandwidth network countries, the solution i see is to use a simple hashing system on ...
243 views

### Is this an acceptable authenticated encryption?

After much deliberation, I've decided to use a normal Encrypt-then-MAC scheme instead of an authenticated encryption mode such as GCM as authenticated encryption primitive. This is due to the lack of ...
### What is meant by $\tilde\Omega(\lambda^4)$?
Say that I have $$C_1 = AES_{k_1}(M_1)$$ How difficult would it be to find a key, K2 and plaintext M2 $$C_2 = AES_{k_2}(M_2)$$ such that $$C_1 == C_2$$ How would using a block cipher ...