# All Questions

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### Diffie-Hellman is Post-quantum secured?

If Alice and bob have a secure channel for key-exchange and mallory don't man-in-the-middle attack them but in the future eavesdrop connection and see the key exchanged, can mallory break it like RSA ...
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### Speeding up partially known plaintext preimage recovery attack on MD5

Suppose there are three messages A, B and C of different length, that are 16 DWORDs in ...
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### Safety of DSA key parameters sharing

I'm looking for a solution to use in a context where I need to be able to generate new asymmetric key pairs quickly (using a widely recognized algorithm, and EC-DSA is not applicable). It sounds like ...
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### Does a break in a collision resistance property of a hash function by definition implies an attack at the first pre-image attack?

Is there a formal security proof in the shape of reduction that states that if an attacker manages to break the collision resistance property of a cryptographic hash function (a random oracle) he will ...
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### 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-...
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### How secure will this be against brute-force attacks?

I'm looking into encrypting files like this: First, I SHA-1 hash the password. Let's say the password is something normal like "hello123", and then hashed. Then I encrypt a file using this: ...
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### Why is a non fixed-length encryption scheme worse than a fixed-length one?

I have the following definition (highlights by me): An (efficient secret-key) encryption scheme $(Gen,Enc,Dec)$, where $Gen$ and $Enc$ are PPT algorithms and $Dec$ is a Deterministic Polytime ...
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### The security of data traffic over both SSTP & SSL

Suppose you're connected to a VPN server via an SSTP VPN, and then you're trying to sign in to your webmail account that is already secured with an SSL certificate, e.g. hushmail.com. However, it ...
435 views

### homomorphic encryption special case of multi party computation?

I read that Fully Homomorphic Encryption schemes are special case of Secure MPC in page no 3. Especially , generalization of two party computation problems stated by Yao But is there any additional ...
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### Why do we need extra hashing if we could use simpler scheme?

Lets say that we use init vector IV, key K and HMAC key H. Message is M. Mode of operation is CBC !!! We usually encrypt this way: ...
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### PRNG taking advantage of very large seed

Can anyone suggest a good (CS)PRNG algorithm that takes advantage of having a very large (ideally arbitrarily large) seed? I'd like to use several kilobytes, perhaps several hundred kilobytes, of ...
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### How to get the keyword from a keyword cipher?

I was given a ciphertext and now I am trying to break it via looking for the keyword. This is a keyword cipher. So: PlainEnglish: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ If ...
689 views

### How can encryption involve randomness?

If an encryption algorithm is meant to convert a string to another string which can then be decrypted back to the original, how could this process involve any randomness? Surely it has to be ...
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### Is the “Signed on date” of a PGP Signature Verified?

I noticed that PGP signatures have a "signed on" field. I was wondering if this is "trustworthy" information and if so how is it accomplished. For example, I can't see how it could be trusted ...
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### Does an attacker gain an advantage if they have the initialisation vector?

Does an attacker gain any advantage by knowing which initialisation vector was used for encryption?
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### Definition of the term “key”

I've looked in many places (NIST, text books, online resources) and I cannot find an answer to the definition of the term "key" from a semantic point of view. Is it the "key" to cipher-texts (i.e. ...
577 views

### Toy public/private key example open to frequency analysis?

I've been looking at an online Public Key Encryption Example (summarized below). It seems to me that choosing cyphertext = plaintext^(key) mod n would produce the ...
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### Building a cryptography system by combining a block cipher and a stream cipher?

I have to come up with a design for a cryptography system by combining a block cipher and a stream cipher. I can't seem to come up with anything on my own. Can someone point me in the right direction ...
443 views

### Using hash for one time pad key

Recently I've been delving into security algorithms, I already knew some of the (easy) math behind AES and RSA and how to and not to implement it. But well, i got a bit bored so i thought I'd just do ...
368 views

### What is the period of a cipher?

For the following explanation of RC4: It is a variable key-size stream cipher with byte-oriented operations. The algorithm is based on the use of a random permutation. Analysis shows that the ...
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### Sophie Germain primes and safe primes

I am trying to find a list or table of safe prime numbers i.e. the ones that are based on the Sophie Germain primes i.e. $N = 2p + 1$ where $p$ is also prime. All I found till now is this database. ...
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### Is it safe to AES-CBC and AES-CMAC both using the same key?

There is a very similar question (Using a derived key for CMAC) but it doesn't quite answer this one (at least for me it does not). I have a situation where I need to transfer some data. My data has ...
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### Bouncy jdk 1.51 Serpent KAT tests vs Nessie vectors

Having a little trouble getting Nessie vectors working with the Bouncy Castle SerpentEngine. Do the Nessie vectors require a mode or some pre-processing? Nessie Serpent 128, set 1, vector 0 reads: ...
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### How are non-text files encrypted?

I thought encryption algorithms (like AES) are used to encrypt texts. So, how are files or folders (containing pictures, videos, etc.) encrypted? What is it that encryption algorithms exactly encrypt?
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### how to calculate non linearity of AES S-box?

S-box has to satisfy different design criteria. How to calculate non-linearity , propagation criteria for an AES S-box?
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### Perfectly secure shift cipher

Prove that if only one character is encrypted using a shift cipher, then the shift cipher is perfectly secure. I want to show that $P(P=p | C=c)=P(P=p)$. But I don't know how to relate. Can anyone ...
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### SHACAL in SHA-256

I was reading about hash functions, namely SHA, and I read that it is made of the Merkle-Damgard construction. And then the text said that the compression function used is based on the Davis-Meyer ...
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### What is the motivation behind Key-policy Attribute-based Encryption?

What is Attribute Based Encryption? has a nice explanation what both forms (Ciphertext-policy Attribute-based Encryption and Key-policy Attribute-based Encryption) are. My question is: what is the ...
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### Empty message Hash length

I am learning Hash Algorithms and in a presentation (PDF) about these algorithms I read that: Length of $h(m)$ much shorter then length of $m$. Now my question is: What if we talk about an ...
$E_1$ and $E_2$ are IND-CPA secure encryption schemes. $E$ is defined as: $k_1,k_2 \leftarrow K_1 \times K_2$ . $E_{k_1,k_2}(m) \leftarrow E_{1,k_1}(m)||E_{2,k_2}(m)$. Hope the notations are in an ...