# Tag Info

15

We call a primitive broken, if there is any attack faster than bruteforce/what we expect of an ideal primitive. Broken does not mean that there are practical attacks. There are no known collisions in SHA-1. Still we call collision resistance of SHA-1 is broken, because there is a theoretical attack that can find collisions using fewer than $2^{80}$ calls to ...

13

SHA-1 processes data by 512-bit blocks (64 bytes). For a given input message m, it first appends some bits (at least 65, at most 576) so that the total length is a multiple of 512. Let's call p the added bits (that's the padding). The padding bits depend only on the length of m (these bits include an encoding of that length, but they do not depend on the ...

13

No. The wikipedia article is in my honest opinion misrepresenting this article on a reduced round attack on the SHA-2 family of hashes. Although these attacks improve upon the existing reduced round SHA-2 attacks, they do not threaten the security of the full SHA-2 family. In other words, no collisions have been found in any of the SHA-2 hashes. The ...

12

What you want is called a chosen prefix collision. Given p1, p2 you want to find m1, m2 such that hash(p1 || m1) = hash(p2 || m2). Generic attack The generic attack to find this, is creating messages starting with p1 and just as many starting with p2. Thanks to the birthday problem you'll find a match after around 2n/2 messages. For a 128 bit hash like ...

11

To the best of my knowledge there is no formal distinction, since "password hashes" aren't formally defined. That said, if you look at this presentation from the author of scrypt you'll see that he wanted: Password hashing to be CPU hard (i.e. to require significant amounts of CPU processing, in a manner that cannot be optimized away). Password hashing to ...

11

By using the file's hash as IV, you also divulge the file's hash. This allows an attacker to make an exhaustive search on the file contents. It is not difficult to imagine situations where there are only a few millions or billions of possible file contents (e.g. the file contents are an encrypted SAN or password), in which case showing the data hash is an ...

10

That depends on what you want to use the hash function for. For signing documents, sha2 (e. g. sha512) is considered secure. For storing passwords, you should use one of the algorithms dedicated for this purpose: e. g. bcrypt, sha512crypt or scrypt. In order to slow down an attacker, these algorithms apply the hash functions many times with an input that ...

10

I would recommend phasing out SHA-1 in any scenario where collision-resistance of a hash is required, for there is a wide consensus that an attack with $2^{69}$ complexity would work, it would already be feasible by a resourceful entity, and attacks only get better. I'm still confident that SHA-1 is preimage and second-preimage resistant for all practical ...

10

No, theoretically a SHA1 hash can be any 160-bit value, including the string of 160 zeroes. As for your second question, if we fudge a little bit and consider SHA1 a truly random function this becomes the same question as the following: If we flip 160 coins, what is the probability that at least 128 of them will be heads? Solution is left as an exercise ...

9

Those "magic numbers" are related to the security proof behind the HMAC construction. In their Crypto'96 paper, Bellare, Canetti and Krawczyk first prove that $\mathrm{NMAC}_{(k_1, k_2)}(x) = F_{k_2}(F_{k_1}(x))$ forms a secure MAC ("message authentication code") provided $F_k(.)$ is an iterated and keyed compression function enjoying some good security ...

9

The short answer is: technically, no. The weaknesses of MD5 are not an issue here. However MD5 is seriously inappropriate, for it is the wrong king of security primitive; also its reputation is tarnished. If a collision attack was to be feared, then using MD5 would be a disaster, for it is now hopelessly broken w.r.t. to collision resistance; but that does ...

9

Sure. If you want a $b$-bit hash of the message $m$, then use the first $b$ bits of AES-CTR(SHA256($m$)). That'll do the trick. In other words, compute SHA256($m$) and treat the resulting 256-bit string as a 256-bit AES key. Next, use AES in counter mode (with this key) to generate an unending stream of pseudorandom bits. Take the first $b$ bits from ...

9

Not at all secure; generating preimages would be trivial. Here's a demonstration with a three-block message: Here is your suggested method (limited to three block messages): $E_0 = Encrypt( IV \oplus P_0 )$ $E_1 = Encrypt( E_0 \oplus P_1 )$ $E_2 = Encrypt( E_1 \oplus P_2 )$ $E_3 = Encrypt( E_2 \oplus 0 )$ $Hash = E_0 \oplus E_1 \oplus E_2 \oplus E_3$ ...

9

Well, first of all, you need to be clear about the meanings of various cryptographical primitives. Cryptographic hash function; this is a function that takes an input string, and generates a hash. The idea is that we don't know how to create two input strings with the same hash, and so the hash can be used as a replacement for the original string. Now, ...

8

Usually "password hashes" like bcrypt use cryptographic hashes like SHA, so it is like "running a fast cryptographic hash a bunch of times" Cryptographic hashes are designed to be fast and collision resistant. Key derivation functions like bcrypt are designed to do what their name suggests. This has some advantages: If the derived key is stolen it is ...

8

OpenPGP's "Iterated and Salted S2K" is just a single hash instance over a very long input, which consists in the repeated concatenation of the salt and the password. This is extremely GPU-friendly, especially when using a hash function which is built over 32-bit elementary operations (this category includes MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256 and RIPEMD-160; GPU are not as ...

8

This is not a limitation of the cryptographic functions, like SHA or PBKDF, since the zero byte isn't processed any differently. Since the purpose of a salt is generally to travel alongside a human password, libraries that handle the password as a zero-terminated string might also handle the salt as such a string. Obviously, a 0x00 in the salt would ...

8

No, in general, there will always be a pair of inputs that will collide for both hash functions. Specifically, if the hash functions have fixed sized outputs, and both take an arbitrary input which is at least as long as the sum of their outputs, then there will be bitstrings $X$ and $Y$ with $X \neq Y$, $A(X) = A(Y)$ and $B(X) = B(Y)$ Here is a simple ...

8

From John Kelsey on the NIST mailing list for SHA-3 (http://cio.nist.gov/esd/emaildir/lists/hash-forum/msg02656.html if you are on it — it's password-protected): a. We plan to allow the collision and preimage resistance to be the same for SHA3, since that fits with the notion of a single security level, and since that will substantially improve hashing ...

8

Let's get terminology right. If you talk of "unknown s" then s is not a salt; when some piece of data is secret, we call it a key. And your "hash function" is then a MAC. In the context of "password hashing", such things are sometimes called "peppering" (as always, technical terminology is, at its core, a collection of bad puns). If your MAC is correct ...

8

First of all, if your goal is to keep the garbled messages to "once every hundred years", well, you already don't meet that goal, even before the change. With an 8 bit CRC, a random change has a probability 1/256 of being accepted; hence if your wireless network has a transmission error at least once every three months (which, to me, sounds like an ...

7

In general, each combination of a (secure) hash function for input with a (deterministic) pseudo random number generator for output will work here - one "state of the art" example is the one given by D.W. (using AES-CTR as PRNG and SHA-256 as hash). Another way is similar to what PBKDF-2 does to have output with the right length: hash the input (or a hash ...

7

The bit about parallelization is not for hashing one password. But the attacker, by definition, has a lot of passwords to try, and these can be computed in parallel, provided that the function maps well to whatever parallel architecture the attacker would like to use. In the case of the multi-SHA-1 method you describe, it maps very well on GPU. Note that the ...

7

You can use any common slow hash construction that takes a salt with a constant salt. This includes scrypt, bcrypt and PBKDF2. You obviously lose the benefit of the salt. Since the purpose of a salt is preventing multi-target attacks, now an attacker can attack all hashes at the same time. I'd use at least a salt that's unique for your application, so an ...

7

It is possible to build a block cipher out of a great many things. If you want to use a hash function, the classic trick is to follow a Feistel structure, which is, incidentally, the same kind of structure than what DES uses. The schematics on the Wikipedia page are quite clear; you would use the hash function for the "F" part, which combines one (sub)key ...

7

The question is about an attempt to augment an encryption scheme with an integrity-protection measure, by additionally transferring the hash $H=\mathtt{Hash}(P)$ of the plaintext $P$ together with the ciphertext $C=\mathtt{ENC}(P)$ of the original encryption scheme; and having the recipient of an alleged $(C,H)$ obtain the alleged $P=\mathtt{DEC}(C)$, and ...

7

The initial hash values for SHA-512 are the 64-bit binary expansion of the fractional part of the square root of the 9th through 16th primes (23, 29, 31, ..., 53). That is: $$I_0 = \left \lfloor \mathrm{frac} \left (\sqrt{23} \right ) · 2^{64} \right \rfloor$$ $$I_1 = \left \lfloor \mathrm{frac} \left (\sqrt{29} \right ) · 2^{64} \right \rfloor$$ $$\cdots$$ ...

7

A deterministic PRNG is pretty much the same thing as a stream cipher. So you could go with AES-CTR or AES-OFB where available. They're standard, and are much faster than all these HMAC-SHA-512 based constructions. But if you really want to use a hash, then I'd go with the similar HKDF construction: Extraction Step: PRK = HMAC-SHA512("", seed) Expansion ...

7

As fgrieu pointed out, the constants are defined in terms of a binary Linear Feedback Shift Register. Because LFSRs can be represented very efficiently using standard logic gates they have been used for pseudorandom number generation computers for decades. They have fallen out of favor for use directly as secure stream ciphers due to advances in ...

7

The problem with a hash function like you ask for is that, if you hash an $n$-bit string and give the hash to someone else, they can recover the string using $n$ hash calculations with a binary search. For a simple example, let's say the $n=8$, your string is $01011001$ in binary, and its hash is $Y = H(01011001)$. To recover the string from the hash, I ...

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