# All Questions

588 views

### AES key expansion vs. a hash

Is there something special about the AES key expansion algorithm that makes it secure, or it is a compromise between security and speed? For example, say with a key I expand it by taking pbkdf2(key) ...
834 views

### Why is an Encrypt-and-MAC scheme with deterministic MAC not IND-CPA secure?

I'm preparing myself to exam, but I have a lot of troubles with rigorous proofs. It's the task from two-years ago exam. At the bottom I reminded one definition. Let $(Gen_E,Enc,Dec)$ be an IND-CPA-...
576 views

### What is the strength of unpadded RSA?

I would like to use unpadded RSA for homomorphic encryption in a toy P2P game, for things like fair coin flips and shuffling. How many bits of security does unpadded RSA have, in relation to its key ...
354 views

### Why does .NET's ECB mode implementation append a constant block to my ciphertext?

Consider the following code and output: ...
1k views

### Can we trust digital signatures?

Consider that Alice wants to send a digitally signed message to Bob. Mallory might be able to publish his public key under Alice's name and then impersonate Alice to send a message with an apparently ...
548 views

Sorry if this is a noob questions, but I finally figured out how to implement the Tiny Encryption Algorithm in C++. My question is what to do about padding the key and the plaintext? I know that ...
212 views

### How hard is to find the operators of an addition knowing the sum of them?

I want to learn whether or no there is a cryptographic primitive,scheme assumption that is based on the following hard problem if it is hard . By hard we mean that we have a polynomial adversary: The ...
2k views

### How to sign a message using RSA?

Assuming I already have a D, P, Q, etc of an RSA key: How do I now sign a message? If it matters – the message is around 100 bits. I don't know much about cryptography, but I can get these numbers ...
2k views

### Symmetric vs. Asymmetric cryptographic approaches to data security

I know the basic differences between Symmetric vs. Asymmetric cryptography, but I'd love to know more details: Exactly why is the asymmetric approach slower than the symmetric? Why does it make ...
80 views

Suppose you need to authenticate yourself to a program with the password - but the program's source code is public, the program doesn't have access to any private information and all your ...
372 views

### Realize a MAC using a Pseudo-random function?

Given a pseudo-random function and assuming that we do not have any other tools, How can we construct a MAC? I believe this can be done. Would like to know if there is more than one way of doing ...
4k views

### Secure way to transfer data over NFC?

I am currently writing a payment system to accept payment details from an NFC enabled smartphone (BlackBerry 9900) to a Windows client (C#.NET) I am currently having two issues relating to security: ...
387 views

### Is EKE attackable by a brute-force password search?

So I'm trying to properly implement the EKE protocol and I'm using C# with the Windows CNG and ECDH key exchange. I need to use this because it's FIPS certified and all that jazz. So what I'm ...
104 views

### Forgery attack against Textbook RSA with simple redundancy

I know how to forge vanilla Textbook RSA message signatures (easy). I've learnt that by adding a good redundancy to the message, it cannot be forged anymore. How can one add redundancy so that the ...
61 views

### Why is it that most messages seem to be expanded?

Whenever I have seen a more secure version of a message, the message seems to be expanded by some factor. One example is RSA encryption, but whenever a message does not appear to be expanded it is ...
86 views

### Do I need to use a CSPRNG when creating salts for user accounts?

I'm not sure about the need of using CSPRNG to create salts for each user account. I found “Cryptographically Secure Pseudo-Random Number Generator in Qt/C++ (Cross platform)” (at StackOverflow) with ...
307 views

### An example of of an information theoretically secure protocol that is not cryptographically secure

Does there exist a protocol $\pi$ for some functionality $F$ which is information theoretically secure protocol that is not cryptographically secure for some threshold number of corrupt parties? ...
75 views

### How to prove a symmetric encryption scheme provides perfect secrecy?

I learned in class that in order to achieve perfect secrecy, the source of the plaintext $\mathcal{P}$ needs to be independent from the source of the encryption key $\mathcal{K}$. We also learned that ...
63 views

### Is “reused one time pad” safe to encrypt a message like “random number + mod”?

I want to encrypt a message that contains a fixed length random number and a long mod. i.e. 1234564284 (created like this 123456 + (123456 mod 9931)) I assume that reusing the same key is not a ...
404 views

### Entropy calculation

I calculated the entropy for "variable", "property" and their concatenation "variableproperty" (with e.g. the Shannon Entropy) and got $2.75, 2.5$ and $3.33$ respectively. These are all entropy per ...
40 views

### Can one passively load-balance HTTPS traffic based on TLS SNI?

Is it theoretically possible to passively snoop into the HTTPS traffic, reliably detect whether or not TLS SNI is attempted to be used by the client, and, if it is, redirect the stream of the ...
170 views

### Is $H'(M) = 5M + 9H(M) \pmod{2^n}$ a secure hash function?

theorem: For arbitrary $i≥0$ there exists $m,n≥0$ such that $35+i=5m+9n$. We can use this theorem for constructing simple hash function. Let $M$ be message and $H(M)$ be its hashed value with hash ...
68 views

### Which values are used for an elgamal cryptosystem public key?

I know that – within the elgamal cryptosystem – the values of $a$ and $b$ are public. But which values are used to create public keys?
126 views

108 views

### Three party coin flipping protocol with only 2 active participants

Is there a coin flipping protocol where: Alice, Bob and Carol don't trust each other, and The coin is flipped only by Alice and Bob, and The result must be trusted by all three participants.
109 views