# Tagged Questions

HMAC is a method for constructing a message authentication code based on a cryptographic hash function.

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### PGP digital signature vs SHA256 HMAC Comparison

First let me admit that I am not a mathematician or a cryptographer. I am responsible for assisting in making a recommendation on a project that is consolidating payment processes within a company's ...
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47 views

### How is the MAC or HMAC secret shared with the other party for verification?

I've seen people everywhere say to use a MAC or HMAC with block ciphers. I think I understand the basics, but I'm still not sure how the HMAC secret is distributed so the other party can verify that ...
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### Using HMAC SHA256 to protect payment files in local trusted network

in a project that I am working on we have been tasked with eliminating PGP while providing sufficient security to protect payment files only within the Company's trusted network. We arrived at HMAC ...
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### why are both ipad and opad required for HMAC? [duplicate]

I was reading about HMAC and why it is crucial to avoid security issues with normal prepending / appending the secret k to a message (issues due to merkel damagard construction). I am not familiar ...
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### New to cryptology, studying Message Authentication Codes

I understand the basic operational theory behind MAC, but I'm getting tripped up on some of the finer details. Also the differences between MAC, HMAC and MIC are getting lost on me, including the ...
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117 views

### What is the best hash for HMAC?

Long question but I am starting to lose sight of all the HASH algo's there are. I know SHAKE128 and 256 are part of the SHA-3 standard but is the SHA3 standard officially released yet? i can only ...
1answer
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### HMAC tag to verify the key (verification in the reverse direction)

A quick question. Are there any problems with the following HMAC use-case: We have two entities ($A$ and $B$), both of them have a secret ($A$ has $S_0$ and $B$ has $S_1$) $A$ generates a random ...
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### Security of integrity protection with HMAC vs AEAD

I'd like to know how the security of the integrity protection compares between: HMAC-SHA-256 with an 32 byte tag or a truncated 16 byte tag AES-GCM with a 16 byte tag AES-CCM with a 16 byte tag or ...
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638 views

### Encrypt-then-MAC: Do I need to authenticate the IV?

In the setting of Encrypt-then-MAC, do I need to include the IV in what I'm HMACing, or is authenticating just the AES-encrypted data sufficient?
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### CTR HMAC SHA256 implementation

After trying to invent my own AES mode, I decided to just implement something that's known to work, namely CTR with HMAC SHA256. From what I understand, I can use the IV as a counter, and the IV ...
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### Separate keys for encryption and MAC? [duplicate]

I use HMAC(ciphertext)+ciphertext for authenticated encryption. The same key is used for both MAC and encryption. Is that right? Is using separate keys for MAC and encryption necessary or any good? ...
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### If you know the messages, and the results of HMAC(key, message) can you find the key?

If the attacker has 1 billion 4KB (random-noise) messages and sha256-HMACs for those messages (all using the same key), can they calculate the key that was used, before the universe dies?
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### Is the result of HMAC-sha256 distinguishable from random noise?

Is if the result of HMAC-sha256 distinguishable from random noise? If so, given: a collection of 1000 keys, and 1000 messages of random noise, 100 signed by each of only 10 of those keys Can ...
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### Using hashed password as shared secrets. Good or bad idea?

I built a system that allowed users to generate an unlimited number of email addresses. Instead of storing each one in a db, I created addresses dynamically and made the address an hmac signed ...
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### Equivalent key size between HMAC and AES?

I have seem comparison between AES and RSA, e.g., AES 128 bit key is equivalent to RSA modulus 3072 bits. Is there such comparison between AES key size and HMAC?
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### Hashing - Digital Signing and Trivial Stretching

Two very basic questions: 1. Digital Signing Why is it not possible to just simply replace the hash value from the request? Examples: ...
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### Using Permutation polynomial to compute a MAC

Is the following MAC secure? For a block $y_i$ in a file, we defined a MAC as follows: $Mac_i:PRF(k,i) \cdot g^{y_i \cdot r_i} \bmod p$. Where $p$ is a prime number, $g \in \mathbb{G}$,$PRF(k,i)$ is ...
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### Generate secure password hashes without access to PBKDF2 or bcrypt

Given is a system, which does provide only implementations of fast hash algorithms (MD5, SHA1, SHA-256, SHA-512). There is no implementation of PBKDF2, bcrypt or scrypt available. The system does ...
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60 views

### wireless network security protocol

In network security, encryption and integrity done by the same algorithm that is AES-CCM in that MIC generated by CBC-MAC and encryption done by CTR mode. So suppose I want to do encryption with any ...
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### Performing HMAC with random key before MAC comparison

In Laravel (a PHP framework) I can see that they calculate a HMAC with a random key over the final HMAC before comparison. This additional HMAC calculation is of course performed for both the ...
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### How to implement HMAC SHA-256

I am trying to figure out how the HMAC SHA-256 hashing algorithm works. I know that we have to use the following: H (K ^ opad)|| H ((K ^ ipad)|| text)). The ...
3answers
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### Updating the secret key used for HMAC

I am designing a distributed system, composed by a set of physically distributed embedded devices (8 bit cores with less than 1 KB of RAM). The devices need to be able to authenticate the originator ...
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### Integrity protection in wireless sensor networks [closed]

I have done a lab about wireless sensor nodes and got in touch with encryption for the very first time. There are some questions on my sheet, especially on integrity protection (the attacker wants to ...
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### Adding a Password Hash (key derivation) function to existing password storage solution

As always we are trying to improve password storage; before just adding new ways of storing our password we need to define what threats we will mitigate by adding in a new way to store our password. ...
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### How to use HMAC for authenticating multiple messages

The standard HMAC function, $H(K, m)$, authenticates a single message $m$. Instead, I'd like to authenticate 2 messages, like this: $$H'(K, m_1, m_2)$$ The simplest solution, $H(K, m_1||m_2)$, ...
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### Encryption and HMAC in a PSKC file

This is the PSKC standard https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc6030.txt In Section 6.1 6.1. Encryption Based on Pre-Shared Keys They have the following ...
2answers
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### How many times can a key be used for HMAC-SHA256 before it needs to be rotated?

If I wanted to use hmac for proving that a value hadn't been tampered with, how many times can I use a key before it needs to be rotated?
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### Specific example of a MAC in TLS?

This seems like quite a dumb question, but I really don't know if I'm finding a answer anywhere. I understand that if i access a website that is secured with TLS, we exchange ciphersuites and so on, ...
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### How does SafeNet MobilePass calculate the counter for following passwords?

Original Question: How does SafeNet MobilePASS generate passwords? The algorithm to calculate passwords was implemented by the author of the original question here: ...
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### HMAC ipad and opad choice

It is written in the HMAC paper that the $ipad=0x36$ and $opad=0x5c$ were chosen such that it maximize the Hamming-Distance of the part of the key used in the inner and outer part of the HMAC process. ...
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### secure embedded/microcontroller crypto using AES-ctr with hmac-sha2

The embedded device is a low-power 8-bit microcontroller (memory usage is constrained to about 10kb code, 1kb ram). As the device is battery-powered and manual service should be minimal, more powerful ...
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### if using cbc+hmac dealing with small size of data(less than 128bit) , will it cause any problem?

if use AES-cbc,HMAC-SHA256, and there is some txt needed to be enc, and I divide this txt into small packages with variable length, then enc them. some of these package can be less than 128bit. Is ...
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### What happens when cbc+hmac get a replay attack?

If it use AES-CBC and HMAC-SHA256 for message send online, and someone try to replay attack on this message. Can the attack be successful? what will be happen when attacking?
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### Is the output of AES-CBC + MAC the same size as the input?

I use AES-CBC and HMAC-SHA256 to encrypt a text file. Will the output be larger in size than the input or will it be the same size? Is it more secure secure if the size of the output is larger?
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### Key derivation for AES-Encryption key and HMAC

Okay so I have two options for how I would derive two keys for AES encryption and HMAC they are as follows: Run BCrypt on a users passphrase and then use the bouncy castle implementation of HKDF in ...
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### Using bcrypt derived keys for encryption?

Sorry for this ignorant question but I am currently weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of BCrypt over PBKDF2 and from what I have read BCrypt is considered more secure but from what I have ...
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### ASCII input to HMAC weaker than raw bytes?

In various cryptographic programs I've written (most have been toy problems, but this current one is not) I have taken a slothful approach to performing a message digest (hash) of numerical input. I ...
0answers
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### Why HMAC=H(message|key) is unsafe? [duplicate]

As mentioned in wikipedia, HMAC=H(message|key) is not safe, but I don't know the reason. Anyone can tell me why? or give me an example? Thank you in advance.
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### IPsec authentication and encryption lgorithms

I am looking for the implementation of IPsec security algorithms for both authentication and Encryption. Is there any open source implementation available for the same ? And if someone supposed to ...
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59 views

### Storing salts and iteration number?

I have a function that derives two sub-keys from one passphrase using PBKDF2 one which is used as a encryption key the other for HMAC generation, because these two sub-keys will need to be regenerated ...
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### HMAC_DRBG Generate Process: requesting N bytes at once different from requesting N bytes in total?

Am I correct in assuming that HMAC_DRBG would return different results if I, e.g. first request 4 bytes followed by a request of another 4 bytes instead of asking for 8 bytes at once? It seems that ...
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### Can adding nonces make challenge response authentications weaker?

In a custom protocol we want to replace an aged tiger32 based challenge response authentication. I suggested that we use something existing, so threw HMAC into the room. As per wikipedia it works as: ...
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### How is HMAC hashed message decrypted on the receiver side

We know that MAC algorithm and key are used in both sender and receiver side to get the matching MAC tages to prove that the data is authentic. Now in HMAC we know that, it makes use of crytographic ...
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### PBKDF2 Salt and Password Ordering

I am currently reading about PBKDF2, and understand that the salt is used only once, while the password is used multiple times in the computation of the final key (see this question). How would the ...
2answers
515 views

### Is it secure to derive an AES key from a MAC?

I'm working on a project where we need to encrypt a large number of files and store them on the cloud. And I'm wondering if the following process would be secure (we have a “Hardware Security Module” ...
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120 views

### Regular MACs vs Carter-Wegman MAC

Carter-Wegman MAC variants (VMAC, UMAC etc) are known to be very fast and efficient when compared to MAC algorithms that are based on block ciphers and compression functions (like HMAC, CMAC etc). ...
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### How can finding a collision help an attacker with tampering messages with HMAC

As stated in the HMAC RFC (RFC 2104): The strongest attack known against HMAC is based on the frequency of collisions for the hash function H. How can a collision benefit an attacker? I would ...
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216 views

### Block-cipher based vs Hash based MAC

When it comes to MAC algorithms one can have many choices. CBC-MAC, CMAC, PMAC etc are some MAC algorithms that rely on block ciphers (ex AES) to generate a MAC. On the other hand HMAC is very popular ...
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117 views

### Are there any cryptographic flaws in my webhook signing process?

Out of band my services have exchanged secret keys. These secret keys are then used to prevent two things of the webhooks (HTTP calls triggered by Service A to Service B when an event occurs in ...
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155 views

### Is HMAC-SHA-1 secure?

Although SHA-1 theoretically has collisions, HMAC-SHA-1 which is based on SHA-1 is still widely used (in TLS for example) and is considered to be secure. How is that possible?