# Tag Info

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1 - How feasible is it that the chip's manufacturer can predict the output of this PRNG when it passed tests from the people applying the use of this RdRand instruction in kernels? A strong stream cipher's output is random and unpredictable to anyone not knowing the key. See where this is heading? Just because something looks random doesn't mean it's ...

13

Have you heard of the strange story of Dual_EC_DRBG? A random number generator suggested and endorsed by the government that exhibits some very suspicious properties. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_strange_sto.html From that article: This is how it works: There are a bunch of constants -- fixed numbers -- in the standard used to ...

12

A Smart Card is small portable physical device, typically flat and in the format of a traditional credit card (sometime much smaller: an example is the SIM card in a mobile phone), embedding: An Integrated Circuit with memory providing permanent data retention; that's using EEPROM, Flash, or FRAM in most of today's Smart Cards. Temporary coupling means ...

11

1 - How feasible is it that the chip's manufacturer can predict the output of this PRNG when it passed tests from the people applying the use of this RdRand instruction in kernels? As nightcracker correctly stated, any strong cryptographic PRNG will produce a stream of numbers that pass statistical tests. However, the manufacturer has some constraints: ...

10

Hardware implementations are common, and likely to become more common as security needs increase, rather than less common. One place they're used is in the digital signature of messages, such as messages going to/coming from a Smart Card used for banking. Those are tiny, slow, limited processors, and a hardware implementation has the potential to improve ...

9

Would it be useful for companies who need to keep their data safe? No, a one-time-pad is only useful in very rare circumstances. The main issue is key-management. You can only use each pad once, it's as large as the data you want to encrypt, and you need to get it to all parties in a secure way. The direct competition of a one-time-pad is a stream cipher. ...

8

A pure algorithmic approach does exist, however it only provides a fuzzy bound. It is related to the proof of work / client puzzles I described in this answer. The signer will sign the message using a normal digital signature, and use the message and signature to instantiate a "cryptographic puzzle." A cryptographic puzzle is a moderately hard function ...

8

I am the designer of the random number generator that is behind the Intel RdRand instruction. How feasible is it that the chip's manufacturer can predict the output of this PRNG when it passed tests from the people applying the use of this RdRand instruction in kernels? It isn't. We cannot. It passes the tests because it is a cryptographically ...

7

I think this question is setting up a false dichotomy. It's not that a researcher has an opinion as to whether they prefer software or hardware implementations. The choice of implementation depends on the requirements of the specific cryptosystem you're building. For example, if you're designing a system to encrypt voice traffic on a mobile phone network, ...

6

As pointed in this comment, using a huge random key for a sound block cipher is an excellent defense to resist ASIC/GPU attacks. Each bit added doubles the effort required. If an adversary was able to build $10^{12}$ ASICs each capable of testing $10^{12}$ keys per second, odds of finding a 128-bit key by brute force running that for a decade are less than ...

5

One-Time Pads only protect secrecy Encrypting with a one-time pad only protects the secrecy of the message. It does not protect the integrity of a message. An attacker can flip bits in the cipher-text and that will flip bits in the plain-text. To protect the integrity of the message you need some sort of Message Authentication Code (MAC). This can be done ...

5

325 MB/s is already good, i.e. you will not get much more with another implementation. Also, SHA-1 is a sequential algorithm, so multiple cores or a GPU will not help you. Specialized hardware is probably your best bet to make SHA-1 faster. (Also, if SHA-1 is the bottleneck then you are able to move data around faster than that, which is impressive; ...

5

A quick web search for "randcam" showed me this german page Zufallszahlen aus der Webcam ("random numbers from the web cam"). (All other hits on the first Google result page are about an unrelated Pistonless rotary engine). This page is about a program available from the same site, which tries to gather entropy from a web cam and produce "real" random ...

5

A video camera can obtain entropy, but only at a fairly low rate and only if allowed to see "unusual" scenes… like someone making funny faces, unusual movements, etc. Of course, this only works in a room with no video bugs. Theoretical explanations… Depending on your knowledge-range, the following sources may be able to explain ways webcams can be used ...

4

There can't be any mathematical "fact that prevents ... open-source software (...) and hardware", since one could just use F(k,counter) or F(k,rounded(time)) as the one-time password. There could be the physical fact that it would be too easy to physically extract the secret key from open-source hardware running open-source software. (In his answer, fgrieu ...

4

The best we can do today, in matter of token similar to SecurID (that is with the restriction that the authenticating value produced by the token is keyed-in by a human), is open-source software on the verifier side, provided that we accept that there is a secret key on that side or we have some communication link to the token able to transfer more data ...

4

Your question is pretty confusingly written, but let me try to make some sense of it. You say you receive 8 bits of input every cycle. You want to encrypt the input using AES, which operates on 128 bits at a time. This means that you need to buffer the input somehow (a shift register might be handy here) for 128 / 8 = 16 clock cycles, until you've ...

4

See section D.2.2 of FIPS 186-3. The modular reduction can be expressed as two additions and two subtractions of values which are assembled by concatenating selected 32-bit words of the 448-bit value which is to be reduced. Note that these additions and subtractions are modular, so you may have to mind some carries.

4

For free software-based solutions on an x86_64, OpenSSL is the best around. Intel's IPP is purported to be 20% faster, and it's software-only, but it's not free (about 200USD, or 80USD for the academic version) and you have to fill out a form saying you're not from N. Korea, etc. There are hardware accelerators in the form of SSL cards/chips, but are ...

3

Designing an HSM or other secure device is relatively easy; making it reliable even in the absence of adversary requires careful engineering; making it safe against adversaries with some level of physical access is hard; demonstrating that it is safe (for some definition of that) is even harder. One thing to worry about is integrity of stored data ...

3

If this is a good HRNG (look for security reviews) I suppose yes. But it would be excruciatingly slow (HRNG's are not known to be fast, generally you use them to get 256-512 entropy bits to seed a PRNG and go with that) and you still have the key exchange + reuse OTP problem. Note this tool apparently integrates itself with the Linux entropy pool, so I'm ...

3

This page gives details of a successful extraction of a 3DES key from an IBM 4758 (FIPS 140-1 Level 4): http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/descrack/. In summary, it required 20 mins of access to the device, 2 days of (offline) cracking time, and about \$1000 in equipment. Not sure if this quite answers the question you were asking in that it relies on ...

3

FIPS 140-2 Security Level 2 does not require any form of security measure to prevent extraction of secrets. It simply requires tamper evidence, that is, it should be possible to notice that such attack took place by looking (for instance) at some seal on the device or at a log file. To answer your question, extracting a secret may therefore take 0 seconds ...

3

Your hurdles are going to be commercial and political, such as patents and other forms of IP. Technically, there would be nothing from preventing you from building such a system. Open Source is a licensing model, not a technology. But think about the efforts that went into building the original SecurID token. You need a very low power microprocessor, a ...

3

While we obviously don't know who is using what and where, we know the U.S. phased out their last mechanical systems (the KL-7) in the 1980s. The M-94 (Jefferson Cipher Disk) was a clever and simple implementation of a polyalphabetic substitution cipher, so there's no reason it couldn't be used today. But the U.S. Army stopped issuing them during WW-II. ...

3

I'm not a researcher in the field of cryptography. With that out of the way, the most obvious reasons I can think of are: Software is more universally deployable, increasing the target audience of some solution. With a hardware solution, potential customers may be forced to invest a huge amount of money to deploy it. A software solution is probably cheaper ...

3

Don't think you've missed something. How do they keep these systems from being broken by someone just looking at the information in the smartcard that houses the key? Those systems have indeed been (and frequently are) broken via Hardware reverse-engineering. Therefore I would chime in with your "not secure". OTOH: decrypting AV signals isn't like ...

3

The access codes were recently leaked (by whom, I don't know). My Yubikey is listed and I can confirm that the access codes were necessary and sufficient to reprogram it. You can change or remove the access code as part of reprogramming too. The leak doesn't make the Yubikeys useless in the extremely unlikely event of Gox rising from the flames — no ...

3

No, you will not be ble to abuse challenges in that way. You may be thinking about e.g. raw RSA, where signing and decryption are mathematically similar. However, this is not possible in FIDO U2F: All the defined signature algorithms use SHA256 on the signed data, meaning that you'd have to brute force search for something that produces the correct ...

2

One technology that is required for such a token is the provisioning of the keys for the One-Time-Password (OTP)-based algorithm and then you have to also pick an OTP algorithm. I co-chaired the group in the IETF who standardized these protocols (at the time when the RSA patents expired). Here is a pointer to the group called KEYPROV: ...

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