All Questions

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How to salt PBKDF2, when generating both an AES key and a HMAC key for Encrypt then MAC?

When using Encrypt-then-MAC with AES and HMAC by password, and given 128 bits of payload with the ciphertext to store a random salt, which would be more secure: Using PBKDF2 with then entire 128 bit ...
506 views

Is the One Time Pad (OTP) considered a cryptographic hash function?

As the title states, would the One Time Pad (OTP) be considered a cryptographic hash function?
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Are hash trees an alternative, quantum-resistant signature scheme which can replace RSA?

Can hash trees provide quantum resistant signatures to replace RSA for signing securely? What is the key size and how many times can we use same key?
321 views

Is it possible to break a hash-based block cipher?

Let's define the following block cipher: $C_n = M_n \oplus H(k + n)$ where $C_n$ is the nth block of ciphertext, $M_n$ is the nth block of plaintext, $H$ is a cryptographic hash function, and $k$ is ...
145 views

How to construct a yes/no election protocol, such that only the result is revealed?

Can we use a threshold scheme to construct a (yes/no)-election protocol, such that every voter can give a positive or negative vote or he can abstain, and such that only the result of the election is ...
246 views

How secure is the knapsack?

Can the knapsack be used in cryptography in a secure sense (described below)? Knapsack problem: Given some number $X$ and a set $W$ of weights $w_1, w_2, ... w_n$, find a subset $S$ of $W$ (if it ...
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132 views

Code-breaking software [closed]

Is there any (free) software available to check for standard encryption algorithms such as the Caesar cipher? Advanced encryption algorithms such as RSA, DES, AES, etc. are not necessary.
356 views

Simple homomorphic crypto for 32-bit integers

I'm looking for a simple way to perform homomorphic crypto on 32-bit integers. My only requirement is that I can add and subtract from the plaintext value without actually decrypting it. The crypto ...
366 views

Break double encryption

Let $E_k$ : {0,1}$^l$ be a block cipher encryption function with block-size $l$ and key-length $n$. In class, we saw that a double encryption with two independent keys $E{}'_{k_1k_2}(x)$ = ...
530 views

Why xor the message into the state for sponge hashes?

Sponge hashes like Keccak(SHA-3) and CubeHash, xor a message block into part of the internal state. Why use a reversible operation like xor for that, instead of replacing that part of the state with ...
716 views

Why can't I break ElGamal encryption by brute-forcing the secret exponent?

I am doing a course on cryptography on coursera and one of the topics covered was the ElGamal Encryption system. I am using the terms as defined in Wikipedia. Alice publishes $g$ and $g^x$. ...
142 views

High Power Computing for Crypto Research

Obviously, much of cryptography requires the assumption that adversaries have bounded computing power. So, I was wondering, are there any fields in cryptographic research for which high power ...
416 views

Properties of Ideal Straight P-Boxes

What properties should an ideal straight P-Box exhibit?
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Will length-extension work if secret is not prefixed but appended to the data? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: Why is h(m||k) insecure? Length-extension allows to append any data to the message while not knowing the secret. Any length-extension explaination one the web considers ...
225 views

Does Grover's algorithm effect block size or only key size?

We know that Grover's algorithm can speed up cracking symmetric keys. Basically the key space is halved. This means we have to use at least a 256 bit key (to get 128 bit security). I heard somewhere ...
5k views

Example Rainbow Table Generation

I have read up on rainbow tables and think I understand the idea behind them. However, I find that it would be better for me to actually attempt to implement a (very basic) rainbow table generator in ...
1k views

Does the elliptic curve (EC) cryptosystem outperform RSA and DL cryptosystems?

Throughout the literature, it is stated that EC cryptosystems outperform RSA and Discrete logarithm cryptosystems, but I cannot understand how ECC would be more efficient than RSA and DL in terms of ...
387 views

HMAC for short messages

I am using HMAC (hmac-sha256 to be precise) message authentication without encryption. My question is, is having a short message make it easy to determine what my secret key is? My C# code is as ...
789 views

Do known-plaintext attacks exist for public key encryption?

In asymmetric ciphers we publish the public key for anyone, which means an attacker can encrypt any message they want and compare the ciphertext and plaintext without communicating with the owner of ...
8k views

Calculating RSA private exponent when given public exponent and the modulus factors using extended euclid

When given $p = 5, q = 11, N = 55$ and $e = 17$, I'm trying to compute the RSA private key $d$. I can calculate $\varphi(N) = 40$, but my lecturer then says to use the extended Euclidean algorithm to ...
257 views

Odds of false error detection in a randomness test using the chi-squared test?

Common Criteria classifies the requirements for true Random Number Generators, and specifies how these should be tested against failures (these can occur accidentally, or following deliberate attack, ...
129 views

What's the strategy for future directions in cryptography? Bigger numbers/faster searching, or new methods, say, of factoring?

I'm taking a course in cryptography, and I would value any comments. This is not too technical a question, but more about directions or strategy in cryptography. My question is, is public key ...
128 views

Needing to encrypt plain sight information

Okay here are my requirements. I need a solution that can do the following. Lets say I have an encrypted piece of text with the value "20". and I have UserA and UserB I give UserA the Keys (/5 and ...
662 views

Hill cipher, unknown letter value

I've been struggling on this problem for a while now : the Hill cipher is well-known to be vulnerable to known-plaintext attack due to its linearity. Given a key matrix $K$ of size $n\times n$, one ...
406 views

Determining the algorithm used to generate a digital signature

I have a string "abcd pqrs". This string is digitally signed with an X.509 certificate (with its private key) and it produces a signature. From the signed string, is it possible to find out what ...
2k views

Should I salt an AES password at each encryption?

I saw a sample code where the same password is salted with a different value (using PBKDF2) for each encryption. That means that the salt must be stored for each encrypted message. I don't understand ...
540 views

Searching over encrypted data

Is there any library/tool available which can allow me to search over encrypted data? I would like to encrypt data on client side, send it to cloud and perform search in cloud. I've been reading ...
715 views

Benefit of combining classical substitution ciphers with modern cryptography

I know that a simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher is considered extremely weak, on account of linguistic frequency-analysis attacks. However, assume the following: cleartext is encrypted ...
2k views

Difference between symmetric and asymmetric hash function?

The Linux kernel supports symmetric and asymmetric hash functions. E.g. sha1, sha256, ... See tcrypt.c and search for test_hash_speed and ...
743 views

What are monotonic and non monotonic access structures in ABE ?

While reading Attribute Based Encryption Schemes, I did not quite understand what a monotonic access structure or non monotonic access structures are. Is there a popular explanation of those terms ? ...
361 views

What do $0^n$ and $1^n$ mean in cryptography?

EDIT : I added more context. Let $f$ = {$f_k$} be a pseudo random function family. Let $G(x)$ be a pseudo-random generator such that: $G(x)$ = $f_x$($0^k$)$f_x$($1^k$) where k=$|x|$ . I don't ...
310 views

DES key expansion: why are these two descriptions different?

I would like someone to explain me how to generate DES subkeys, because in the documentation that I saw, sometimes they say: "We rotate the initial key according to the number of iterations given ...
167 views

(I am not a crypto expert, so I apologize if the terminology I use is incorrect.) Suppose I have the following simple broadcast encryption scheme for securely sending content to $n$ authorized ...
183 views

Future-Proof Versioning and Validation

I am working on a library (using standard primitives: AES256 CTR; HMAC with SHA256; PBKDF2 with SHA256, 128 bit salt, and 10000 rounds) to encrypt and decrypt data, given a password. The encrypted ...
263 views

Can Add and Multiply On Cipher Text achieve all operations?

A Fully homomorphic encryption scheme needs to support an evaluate function that can do add and multiply operations on cipher text. Can we do all kinds of complex operations on cipher text like ...
595 views

Tools for modelling and analysis of cryptographic protocols

I am designing some cryptographic protocols and I am new to it. Are there any well-known tools that can be used to model and design these protocols? And also verify or analyze their validity? If not ...
Ron Rivest posed a puzzle in 1999. MIT LCS35 Time Capsule Crypto-Puzzle. The problem is to compute $2^{2^t} \pmod n$ for specified values of $t$ and $n$. Here $n$ is the product of two large ...