# Tag Info

21

I sent an email to Ron Rivest and got an answer back. The digits of $\pi$ are used as a sort of random number generator that is used in the Durstenfeld shuffle (see also Knuth vol 3, sec 3.4.2). Below is some pseudocode adapted from the description and code he sent me. S = [0, 1, ..., 255] digits_Pi = [3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, ...] # the digits of pi def ...

15

CBC does not perform authentication This property makes it less suitable for places where authentication is required, basically any transport protocol. TLS uses CBC, but by default performs authentication over the plain text instead of the ciphertext, which opened up a host of attacks. CBC can be used here, but it is error prone and may require an ...

11

I restrict to hash functions $H$ with an output of some fixed size $n\ge1$ bit(s), accepting as input some strings, including all $n$-bit strings; MD5 (resp. SHA-1, SHA-256) is an example of such function for $n=128$ (resp. $n=160$, $n=256$). Whether there exists a solution to $H(x)=x$ depends on the particular hash function. If $H$ is a random function (as ...

8

There are several scenarios where you wouldn’t want to use AES in CBC mode. In CBC mode, each block is dependent on a previous one. As @fgrieu nicely hinted at in his comment, using CBC means that if you have a large, encrypted file and you only want to update/change/modify a tiny fraction of it, you would have to follow the decrypt-modify-encrypt path each ...

7

There's no real difference between $p$ and $q$ in RSA. It looks like OpenSSL just has the agreement "$p$ has to be bigger than $q$" for conveniences. One of the numbers has to be bigger than the other (otherwise they would be the same number, and $p = q$ is very bad in RSA). Just use two examples: $p = 13$ and $q = 11$. $p$ is bigger than $q$, all right. ...

6

Using a MAC on the plaintext may potentially leak information about the plaintext (MAC algorithms do not necessarily ensure confidentiality of the data they are applied to, although some MAC algorithms like HMAC seem pretty safe). If you want to avoid this (theoretical) problem, then you should encrypt the MAC on the plaintext (i.e. MAC-then-encrypt, not ...

6

Actually, given that the MD2 S-box needs to be a permutation, using a Fisher–Yates shuffle does seem a fairly obvious choice to me. (It's pretty much the standard algorithm for generating a uniformly chosen random permutation.) The rand() function used to convert the digits of $\pi$ into a random number from a given interval looks complicated, but is ...

6

While it may be confusing, that Wikipedia article is actually correct! Let me try to explain it a bit better… Definition of key whitening Key whitening is an extremely simple technique to make block ciphers like DES much more resistant against brute-force attacks. Like you’ve already discovered yourself, this is the basic scheme: Or, defining it a bit ...

6

XSalsa20 uses the same cryptographic core as Salsa20 and comes with a security proof that it's secure if Salsa20 is secure. It doesn't use the core of ChaCha and thus has worse diffusion. The way XSalsa20 works is that it hashes its 256 bit key and the first 128 bits of the nonce using HSalsa down to a 256 bit key and then uses that key together with the ...

6

GF$(2^8)$ or $\mathbb F_{2^8}$ can also be viewed as the vector space $\mathbb F_2^8$ of $8$-bit vectors (or bytes) over GF$(2)$ or $\mathbb F_2$. Suppose $\{\beta_0, \beta_1, \cdots, \beta_7\}$ is a basis of $\mathbb F_2^8$ over $\mathbb F_2$, that is, the sum $$a_0\beta_0 \oplus a_1\beta_1 \oplus \cdots \oplus a_7\beta_7, ~ a_i \in \mathbb F_2$$ equals ...

5

I think this would work, although whether it's practical is another matter. For large $x$ it won't be. It's basically an application of mental-poker. First, choose a secure commutative encryption algorithm that is not vulnerable to known plaintext or chosen ciphertext attacks. Everyone generates a random encryption key. Everyone but Alice uses their key ...

5

Nobody can tell you not to "have fun with it" but I would strongly recommend you to first study attacks on other ciphers. Spritz (Rivest & Schuldt) fortunately mentions a lot of research on its predecessor, RC4. This makes it a rather good starting point in my opinion. It is necessary to understand the linguistics and mathematical constructs that are ...

5

First, it's not said that AES is unbreakable, merely that none of the currently known attacks reduce the computational cost to a point where it's feasible. The current best attack on AES-128 takes 2^126.1 operations, if we had a computer (or cluster) several million times more efficient than any current computer and could operate at the thermodynamic ...

4

You can get what you want programmatically. No special ciphers or modes needed. You say there is a single, continuous subset that needs to be encrypted. Thus, you could have a function where the programmer specifies the start of the portion of the plaintext that needs to be encrypted and the number of bytes to encrypt. The function could pull that part out, ...

4

No, this is safe. In fact, if you show a way of distinguish the stream $AES_{k_1}(C) \oplus AES_{k_2}(C)$ from a random stream with fewer than $2^{64}$ outputs, you have just demonstrated a way of distinguishing AES from a random permutation. Here is how this works: suppose we are given Oracle assess to a permutation $P$, which might be $AES_{k_1}$ for ...

4

The sum of PRPs is a secure PRF. That paper gives as a security bound for a sum of two independent PRPs $q^3/2^{2n-1}$, where $q$ is the number of queries and $n$ the block size (i.e. 128 for AES). That means that your construction, correctly used, is more secure than a single PRP, for which the bound is $q^2/2^n$. If you wanted to give an adversary an ...

4

Yes, it would be more secure if they were used correctly. But as it would require a substantially different algorithm, you really would not be talking about DES anymore. Brute forcing usually scales exponentially with the size of the key. However, if the algorithm is substantially altered then it is required to analyze the algorithm again. Note that AES is ...

4

Where did SHAKE128 and SHAKE256 originate from? They follow from the general properties of the sponge construction. A sponge function can generate an arbitrary length of output. The submission of Keccak to the SHA-3 competition proposed a single "XOF" (extendable-output function) with a user defined length, which would have been essentially SHAKE-288. ...

4

"In software" means programming the cipher on a multifunctional processor or smart chip. The normal instruction set is used to build the algorithm, and not available operations have to be emulated. "In hardware" means building the cipher in real hardware, like on a Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) or Application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). ...

3

The affine transformation is defined as a degree 7 polynomial multiplication modulo $x^8 + 1$. In the format of the question, the terms are the right hand column, top to bottom. $A = x^7 + x^6 + x^5 + x^4 + 1$, and $B = x^7 + x^5 + x^2$. The inverse can be determined through several methods. Since there are only 254 valid polynomials (omitting 0 and 1), ...

3

I don't think this scheme would make sense, either from a performance or a crypto-design perspective. From a crypto-design perspective, simply encrypting with a block cipher would be better. Encrypting with a block cipher, or other suitable symmetric-key encryption scheme, takes running time that is linear in the length of the data to be encrypted (not ...

3

What you're looking for is that zero knowledge proof, that some public number is not equal to a couple of secret numbers. It is possible to prove that two numbers are not equal, but it is not that easy to do so, and it is mostly theoretic work. Let's consider two integers $a$ and $b$ for simplicity and prove their inequality: Consider the numbers in their ...

3

Actually, those two algorithms are surprisingly close; I'll write both of them up to show how close they are. They both can be written as a combination of three substeps: A := Add( B, C ) This takes the two points B and C, and adds them together (I'll be writing things in additive notation; in RSA, with would be a modular multiplication) A := Double( B ...

3

Here is a quick idea that came to mind: $n$ be the number of participants. Let $p := 0.5 / n$. Have every participant choose a number not equal to his own, and announce it publicly. After all the numbers were announced, each participant answers with no, if one of the announced numbers match their private one or if a random Bernoulli experiment with sucess ...

3

One way key whitening improves security is by increasing resistance to bruteforce attacks (and doing this essentially for free). Consider, for example, DES. Key is 56 bits, so given a single pair $(M, E=DES(K,M))$ attacker will find $K$ in $2^{55}$ operations on average. By employing key whitening it is possible to increase required effort substantially: we ...

3

SHA-2, like SHA-1, is an ARX hash function: that is, it uses Addition, Rotation, and eXclusive-or for bit diffusion. The purpose of each one is explained very simply and clearly by Khovratovich & Nikolić in their paper "Rotational Cryptanalysis of ARX", so I will simply quote them here: Addition provides diffusion and nonlinearity, while XOR does ...

3

The problem is almost exactly the same as in password based key derivation, so you could use a similar solution. Derive a master secret from your password and a unique salt using e.g. PBKDF2 or scrypt: $S_m = PBKDF(p, s)$. Derive a site-specific secret from the master using e.g. HKDF and the site URL: $S_u = HKDF(S_m, u)$. Turn the site secret into a ...

3

Most advantages have to do with the fact that it includes authentication. For example: An authenticated encryption primitive is easier to use correctly. Only a single primitive that has to be secure. One pass over the data to both encrypt and authenticate may be faster. (Bernstein's rebuttal is that a separate MAC allows faster detection of forgeries, ...

3

The S-boxes in quite many encryption algorithms (for example, in AES) have been already built with math (the AES S-box is an inversion function in $GF(256)$ plus an affine transformation). The lookup tables exist solely to ease the implementation. In fact, modern Intel/AMD CPU are already equipped with AES round function instructions, so the tables are not ...

3

How does Web Cryptography API (eg window.crypto.getRandomValues) produce secure PRNG? Like the specification says: Implementations should generate cryptographically random values using well-established cryptographic pseudo-random number generators seeded with high-quality entropy, such as from an operating-system entropy source (e.g., ...

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