# Tag Info

12

What happens if the sender is at another point in the sequence? ... the key is pressed while out of range to the car. In a rolling code (code hopping) system, the keyfob transmitter maintains a synchronization counter C, incremented every time a button is pushed. The car receiver stores the most recent validated synchronization counter it has received ...

9

It is not secure, because an attacker can "mix and match" the output blocks from different authentication tags on different input messages, or repeat output blocks for repeated input blocks. For example, if the attacker knows the tag $F_k(m)$ for a one-block message $m$, then it can forge the correct tag $F_k(m) \mid F_k(m)$ for the two-block message $m ... 8 First the theoretical explanations: Integrity and authenticity are different goals to achieve, but both are achieved (for symmetric encryption) with a MAC. You should probably be using encrypt-than-MAC or an authenticated cipher unless you have very good reasons not to. No blanket statements can be made though. HMAC: HMAC is a often used construct. It ... 7 The other answer is correct in general. However, if your messages are all exactly one block long (or all one block after padding), ECB is a secure MAC. A PRP looks like a PRF up to half its bit length, i.e. up to$2^{64}$blocks for AES. A secure PRF is a secure MAC of the same size. Thus, AES ECB used on 128-bit messages is a secure MAC as long as you use ... 7 First, the fact that the data is "easy" to guess (in the sense that an attacker has a one-in-2^32 or a one-in-2^64 chance of guessing correctly) doesn't mean much if the attacker has no way of checking if his guess is correct. Or at least, it's not a problem with the cryptography. Second, even if he does have that ability, the problem of protecting your ... 7 SSL was designed long ago when encrypt-then-MAC wasn't that popular yet. Even TLS 1.2, published in 2008, is pretty old by now, and while encrypt-then-MAC was preferred by then, the practical risks were underestimated for a long time. Padding oracles attacks became well known after several high profile attacks in 2010. With stream ciphers, MAC-then-encrypt ... 7 ECC is indeed used by CloudFlare's website but only for the session key agreement. The authentication is performed using an RSA 2048 bit private key. The corresponding RSA public key is in the certificate. In other words, although ECC is being used, it is not used for authentication and therefore not part of the certificate. The ciphersuite is: ... 5 The attack is even more simple with RSA than with symmetric keys, because the asymmetric encryption key is assumed to be public. Let me tell you a story involving Alice, Bob and Mallory :). Alice wants to send a message to Bob using RSA. Alice encrypts the message using Bob's public key and sends it Mallory performs a Man-In-The-Middle attack, and ... 5 Yes, there are several ways in which Mallory could pretend to be Amy. One obvious way, which doesn't even involve Amy herself in any way, would be for Mallory to perform steps 1 and 2 of the protocol normally, as if he were Amy. Then, given Betty's nonce$n_b$, Mallory can start a second, parallel instance of the protocol, again pretending to be Amy, and ... 5 No, since finding$a$allows offline checking of passwords.$\:$No, although I can't back this part up. 4 I am wondering if using Skein or the Keccak hash algorithm in this construction (as a stream cipher) is secure: In the case of Skein and Keccak it should be secure. However, both of those have defined their own cipher modes which you should IMO prefer. (For speed and compatibility, if not security.) The Skein one is defined in section 4.10 of the ... 4 Cryptography studies properties of information. Information, at least in discrete form (a sequence of bits) can inherently be duplicated. Inasmuch as a document conveys meaning, it can be expressed as a sequence of bits. If someone obtains a copy of the document, they can duplicate the sequence of bits and make other copies. It is impossible to prevent the ... 4 In summary: Yes, HMAC is the way to go for construction of a MAC from an arbitrary concrete iterated hash. We have no constructive argument of security of the MAC constructs in the question; we even have a concrete attack when using some otherwise apparently fine hashes. I consider a hash constructed by iterating a compression function$F$as ... 3 The problem about Man-in-the-Middle attack on Diffie-Hellman is that both sides are not confident about other side's public key (g^a and g^b). If they were sure that they have correct public key of their's friend Man-in-the-Middle attack wouldn't be possible, because MITM attack is based on the forgery of public keys by adversary! If for instance Bob and ... 3 From RFC 4226: 7.4. Resynchronization of the Counter Although the server's counter value is only incremented after a successful HOTP authentication, the counter on the token is incremented every time a new HOTP is requested by the user. Because of this, the counter values on the server and on the token might be out of synchronization. ... 3 If you want$N$serial numbers, your serial numbers will have to use$n$bits for uniqueness, where$n = \log_2 N$. So if you have 100 bits to use for the serial, you could use 20 to get about a million serials and have 80 bits to use for a cryptographic MAC or signature. Now there are two approaches, the symmetric and the asymmetric. In the symmetric ... 3 Well, 32 bits is somewhat short, so one could just try ciphertexts. However, there is a much better attack. Choose M0 arbitrarily, let P be the CBC padding for Headers || CRC || M0, and choose M1 so that CRC( M0 || P || M1 ) = CRC(M0). Submit M0 || P || M1 to be encrypted, truncate the ciphertext to the length of encryptions of M0, and then output the ... 3 If you need a MAC, use a MAC. For example, HMAC which uses a hash function. Don't try to use a random hash function in your own scheme, because some such schemes are not secure. Reason to use/not use this data as input to the hash? (In the context of authenticity of data…) If you do have a secure MAC, any constant data will not affect the authenticity. ... 3 Yes, because Mallory can use Amy and Betty to get any encrypted nonce; Amy and Betty are oracles for Mallory. She just has to send the nonce she has to encrypt to either one of them and they perform the task for her (in another "authentication attempt", using step 1 & 2). Usually you protect against this kind of situation by performing an encryption ... 3 HMAC-SHA-256 is sufficient for up to 256 bit security. Confer e.g. NIST SP 800-107. This recommendation is based on the premise that collision attacks are infeasible against common uses of HMAC, and that you consequently only have to worry about primary pre-image attacks that attempt to recover the secret key (and use this for forging subsequent messages). ... 3 In a rolling code both the sender and the receiver always move forward in the sequence. If the sender has sent the$n$th code, then it will send the$(n+1)$th next. Contrarily, if the receiver has seen the$n$th code it will only accept the$(n+1)$th code or some later code. What happens if the sender is at another point in the sequence? Think of that ... 3 This is vulnerable to a length extension attack. Given a valid nonce/MAC, the nonce can be extended to forge a new valid nonce/MAC value. This is because$m_4\$ is appended to the end inside the outer hash. How this affects you will depend on how you validate your nonce. But in general, this is not a secure construction. There's probably more things wrong ...

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The motivation, to me, is that in reality you can consider any router on the internet to be successfully executing an "intruder-in-the-middle" attack just by forwarding messages unchanged. After a successful execution of the identification scheme, Bob knows that someone on the channel is Alice, which is all the protocol was hoping to achieve. It was ...

3

A zero-knowledge proof is a protocol by which the Prover demonstrate to the Verifier that he knows the solution to a given problem, without giving to the Verifier any additional information about the solution -- that is, no information that the Verifier could not already obtain alone. In the case of the discrete logarithm, the y value is not part of what the ...

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The premise that people cannot make a memory intensive password hashing function is incorrect. scrypt does approximately what is described in the question. Of course you still want to limit the amount of memory, especially if many of these hashes are to be calculated in parallel. Furthermore, you could have a look at the password hashing competition where ...

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The authentication tag is defined as an output parameter in GCM (see section 7, step 7 of NIST SP 800-38D). In all the API's I've encountered it's appended to the ciphertext. Where it is actually placed is up to the protocol designer. The protocol designer may well consider the place behind the ciphertext as ad hoc default though. The name "tag" of course ...

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Having a client (ex. your web browser) use zero-knowledge proofs to authenticate itself to a server only makes sense if the server knows about the client's public key in advance, and if the client keeps the same private key forever. So you could have the client-side generate a keypair when you register your account, and the server records your public key ...

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SRP does DH key exchange with authentication, and has the capability to also authenticate the server as well (though usually the server is authenticated by keeping the verifier secret). If the key is generated strictly from a password and salt, with the salt stored on the server, you can do a dictionary attack on the verifier (e.g. if the server is ...

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I would think these numbers would have been put on the google search engine, and yield (probably) many hits. This assumption is wrong. Certificate serial numbers are not indexed by common search engines, nor are they typically posted to any HTML site. Frankly, I'm not sure why you would assume they'd be indexed. The Wordpress certificate is used for ...

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I'm going to agree with @fgrieu's marvelous post above in a back-handed way. My answer is: No, you don't have to use an HMAC. Do it anyway. As you noted, some hashes, sush as SHA-3 (especially in its Keccak form), Skein (which I was a team member on), and others will work just fine. In the case of Skein, there is a one-pass Skein-MAC that has a proof of ...

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