# All Questions

254 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 ...
396 views

### How to calculate y value from ((y*y) mod prime) efficiently

i am working ECC-224 bit. can any one tell me, how to calculate y value from ((y*y) mod prime) efficiently for large bit numbers.
434 views

320 views

### Designing a key expander out of ciphers

Is it possible to compose or combine $n$ ciphers ($cipher_0, cipher_1, ... cipher_n$) in such a way that they generate $n$ ciphertexts from the same key, $k$, and that recovering the key, $k$, from ...
3k views

### Encryption/ciphers/codes in Chinese

I am quite curious as to how you can perform simple encryption for the Chinese language. Saw a similar question related to encryption/Chinese here: About cryptography in a character language, ...
331 views

### Increase number of rounds for SPN and Feistel ciphers

Read a post on Schneiers blog (and again 2011) about increasing the number of rounds for AES from to "AES-128 at 16 rounds, AES-192 at 20 rounds, and AES-256 at 28 rounds" to raise the security. ...
329 views

### How to do a literature search

How do I do a literature search of the research literature on cryptography? Assume there's some topic in cryptography I'd like to learn more about; how do I search the cryptographic research ...
134 views

### More technical details on the ongoing (alleged) Chinese cyberattacks [closed]

Recently, there has been quite a lot of news about the Chinese compromising various US weapons systems and stealing military designs through "cyberwarfare". I am reading the news sources about these ...
529 views

### How broken is a xor of two LCGs?

Suppose we define a PRG as the xor of two LCGs modulo a 64-bit prime: something like the following Python code. ...
466 views

### Understanding elliptic curve encryption

I'm having a hard time understanding the elliptic curve encryption. One thing thing I don't understand is listing all the points on the curve (mod p). Suppose I have the following elliptic curve: y^2 ...
465 views

### Why must curve25519 shared secret be hashed?

When using the curve25519 DH function, D.J. Bernstein recommends hashing the shared secret before using it as a session key for a symmetric block cipher. Why is that? Hashing won't increase the ...
1k views

### Are NIST's changes to Keccak/SHA-3 problematic?

NIST is working on standardizing SHA-3. They have selected Keccak as the basis for SHA-3, and they plan to make some small changes to it; the result (with NIST's changes) will be standardized as ...
30 views

### Detail about reactive simulatability framework

I'm trying to understand the framework of reactive simulatability using *"PfWa2_00AsyncModel"* from this publication which is a tech report behind the paper A model for Asynchronous Reactive Systems ...
1k views

### How can I determine the GPG/PGP key ID from the RSA modulus?

According to http://www.pgp.net/pgpnet/pgp-faq/pgp-faq-keys.html#key-public-key-forgery, key ID is some lower bits sequence from the modulus (i.e. the $n$ variable): A PGP key ID is just the ...
310 views

### Friedman Index of Coincidence, pruning multiples of the keylength

I'm trying to write a Vigenere decipher script. I defined a couple of possible keylengths using the Kasiski method, using roughly this method: find recurring strings in the ciphertext between 3 and ...
228 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 ...
477 views

### How to attack a fixed LCG with partial output?

To show some colleague programmers exactly how broken C's rand() is (at least on Windows) I decided to break it. So everyone knows the exact parameters, MSVC's ...
900 views

### Why does Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme need a finite field?

I read ampersand's question "Necessity for finite field arithmetic and the prime number p in Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme", where he asked why Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme uses arithmetic in a ...
648 views

### Could one construct a cipher that is secure for friendly parties to use but insecure for hostile parties?

Consider the situation of a nation state (Blue) at war with another nation state (Red). Blue wants to deploy a secure cipher that blue currently can not break, but they are considered that Red could ...
1k views

### Why was the winner of the AES competition not a Feistel cipher?

The winner of the AES competition has a structure that does not qualify as a Feistel cipher, as explained in answers to this recent question. However, most many of the AES candidates, and all 3 out ...
106 views

### What security do digital signatures provide (like used when signing PDFs)?

I want to ask you one question about digital signatures as they are (for example) used when digitally signing PDFs. We know that if our document has a digital signature, we can detect if the original ...
66 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 ...
76 views

### Advise key management protocol

Assume that sender and recipient both already have each others public keys(certificates). Sender needs to generate session key to encrypt some data and sends encrypted data to recipient. All offline - ...
273 views

### Could completely public passphrase hashes ever be reliably secure?

This is a hypothetical question and I only have a basic understanding of Cryptography. If one were to follow the very best cryptographic practices for storing passphrases, could it ever be possible ...
349 views

### What does a “cycle” mean in cryptography benchmarks?

In this table of the "Crypto++ 5.6.0 Benchmarks", for example, cryptographic algorithm performance is measured in cycles per byte for symmetric ciphers, and in cycles per operation for asymmetric ...
172 views

### what is an injective trapdoor function?

The answer to this question at Crypto.SE is clear about what a trapdoor function is, but what makes a trapdoor function "injective"?
714 views

### Perfect zero knowledge for the Schnorr protocol?

Can somebody explain (or point to a reference) why the Schnorr protocol cannot be proved zero knowledge?
2k views

### Why is AES not a Feistel cipher?

I am studying for an exam right now. And I wanted to make sure I got this point correct. AES is not a Feistel cipher because the operations in AES are not invertible. Is the above statement ...
132 views

### Career advice for our readers [closed]

I am a first year math PhD student with work experience and an MS in math. Do you have any advice regarding internships involved with cryptography and other mathematics other than the NSA? Thanks.
225 views

### How to perform benchmark of block/stream ciphers?

I would like to perform some benchmarking of different block and stream ciphers for general data (lossless and lossy data) encryption and decryption (with focus on power consumption). To get general ...
613 views

### How to provide secure “vanity” bitcoin address service?

Bitcoin addresses are RIPEMD-160 hashes of the public portion of a public/private ECDSA keypair (along with an abbreviated hash of the hash to provide a check code, as @pulpspy notes in a comment). ...
4k views

### What makes RSA secure by using prime numbers?

I am just learning about the RSA algorithm. Looking at the first two steps: Choose two distinct prime numbers $p$ and $q$. Compute $n = pq$. I have some probably stupid questions: Why do $p$ ...
277 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 ...
321 views

### What crypto system allows for 3 parties: Party 1 who makes an assertion, Party 2 mutates the assertion, Party 3 validates it

I'm looking for the cryptographic equivalent of a Drivers license where the issuer can be verified, the issuer doesn't need to know who you showed the drivers license to, but also allows ...
231 views

### What are the possible cryptographic implications of Zhang's proof of the Twin Prime Conjecture?

Earlier this year, Yitang Zhang published a proof of a weakened form of the Twin Prime Conjecture. I'm wondering if any of the new mathematical machinery he developed has uses in cryptography or could ...
68 views

### How does Dissent protect against Sybil Attacks?

Dissent claims to be able to be resistant to Sybil attacks. Dissent seeks to offer accountable anonymity, giving users strong guarantees of anonymity while also protecting online groups or forums ...
270 views

### random number generator and seed

I'm working with openssl cryptographic libraries, I'm new to all these cryptographic stuffs and slowly I'm learning all these. I have a doubt regarding random number generator, I'm using ...
376 views

### Provable Encryption

Is it possible to encrypt data in a way that it can be proven that the data is encrypted, without revealing the key? Alice chooses some plaintext, then she encrypts it with a certain scheme. She ...
680 views

### Using Whirlpool hashing function to encrypt data

I've read that the Whirlpool hash function can produce footprints that could be used as a pseudorandom generator. Is it "OK" to use it to encrypt some data using something like the following? ...
894 views

### What is the security loss from reducing Rijndael to 128 bits block size from 256 bits?

As you know in the past few weeks it has emerged that NIST/NSA have been involved in weakening encryption standards over a long period of time so that they can retain the ability to break encryption ...
653 views

### How is the initial permutation of DES created?

I am creating a program in C language with DES (Data Encryption Standard) functionality, but don't know how to apply the initial permutation. Is it achieved by swapping the values? If "yes", then ...