# Tag Info

15

Length extension attack The reason why $H(k || m)$ is insecure with most older hashes is that they use the Merkle–Damgård construction which suffers from length extensions. When length extensions are available it's possible to compute $H(k || m || m^\prime)$ knowing only $H(k || m)$ but not $k$. This violates the security requirements of a MAC. Like all ...

10

HMAC was there first (the RFC 2104 is from 1997, while CMAC is from 2006), which is reason enough to explain its primacy. If you use HMAC, you will more easily find test vectors and implementations against which to test, and with which to interoperate, which again explains continued primacy. Being the de facto standard is a very strong position. On many ...

8

Yes, this would be secure. CTR (Counter) mode based on keyed function $F_K$ is secure as long as its output $$W_i = F_K(i)$$ is unpredictable given previous outputs $$F_K(1),F_K(2),\ldots,F_K(i-1).$$ This requirement is essentially the definition of a pseudo-random function (PRF). Most HMAC instantiations with widely used hash functions are believed to ...

8

Would you use HMAC-SHA1 or HMAC-SHA256 for message authentication? Yes. That is a semi-serious answer; both are very good choices, assuming, of course, that a Message Authentication Code is the appropriate solution (that is, both sides share a secret key), and you don't need extreme speed. How much HMAC-SHA256 is slower than HMAC-SHA1? Those ...

7

Is the calculated MAC encrypted using AES? What is the purpose? How about signing and verifying? How does AEs Play a role here? Is the case here that the encrypted AES is HMACed for signing and the HMAC is verified No, the MAC is not encrypted per se, however, it is calculated in conjunction with a key (independent of the encryption key). Simply ...

7

Well, SHA-1 and SHA-256 are both limited to inputs of no more than $2^{64}-1$ bits; the HMAC architecture itself prepends a logical IPAD (which is 512 bits); hence both HMAC-SHA160 and HMAC-SHA256 are both limited to inputs of no more than $2^{64} - 513$ bits, which is about 2 exabytes. I rather suspect that this is not a serious limitation to your ...

7

Comparing a brute force attack on DES (with $2^{56}$ operations) to a birthday attack on CMAC (with $2^{64}$ operations) would appear to be an apples-to-Volkswagen comparison; they are assuming two things are similar, when they really aren't. The brute force attack on DES involves obtaining a single plaintext/ciphertext block pair, and then going through ...

6

This is highly insecure, for the same reason that ECB mode and simple substitution ciphers are. Every time you use the word the in your message, it will be encrypted the same way. The same goes for other, lower-frequency (but still fairly common) words -- like as or with or will (or any of hundreds of other examples). This is a humongous clue to ...

6

It looks like, given your adversary model, things should be secure. HMAC as a randomness extractor has been shown to be good, especially when we can assume the hash function is collision resistant. That paper also has some results which tell how you could guard against the collision resistance being broken (basically use a hash function with larger output ...

5

Not using cryptography on URI: If you store subscribers on a database, maybe you could also store additional (say) 128-bit random value on some column when there somebody about to unsubscribe. This way there is no meaning for the value beyond this transaction and it cannot e.g. leak anything about the key. If you cannot use additional data on the ...

5

As shown in the paper Ricky Demer linked in the comments, HMAC can be secure even when the underlying hash function is not collision resistant. Only PRF-ness of the hash function is required, and SHA-1 is not known to lack it. Or a couple of other conditions can suffice even if it isn't a PRF. Intuitively, it makes sense that HMAC is secure as a MAC even ...

5

"Frequency analysis of the output might help determine simple words in the ciphertext such as 'the' etc if that word is repeated and sent multiple times. This isn't necessarily a problem as it's only a simple word and doesn't convey much meaning to the message". If the word "the" doesn't convey much meaning, then why have you used that particular ...

5

Under the assumption that $(K,\text{Msg})\to H_K(\text{Msg})$ is a secure MAC (be it HMAC or any other MAC), and $\text{Nonce}$ does not repeat and is of fixed size, both $H_K(\text{Msg}||\text{Nonce})$ and $H_K(\text{Nonce}||\text{Msg})$ are demonstrably secure, in the sense that an adversary not knowing $K$ can't distinguish either from random, even for ...

4

This is a type of code book security. Code books can be very strong or very weak depending on operational security. If you never reuse a code book word even in a single message and the code words are genuinely random - this approach could work. Of course if you can't reuse code words and need perhaps 40 instances of THE and 30 instances BE to avoid ...

4

AES-GCM uses single block cipher operation and can be processed in parallel, therefore it should be faster. CTR+HMAC requires block cipher and hash function, which usually can't be processed in parallel. Also it requires 2 keys. It is often miss-implemented (MAC-than-encrypt or MAC-and-encrypt, using single key). Cipher-text length is the same for same ...

4

As pointed in the question, with common Merkle–Damgård hashes like SHA-256, $H(key\ \Vert\ message)$ is vulnerable to a length extension attack, where $H(key\ \Vert\ message\ \Vert\ pad\ \Vert\ extension)$ can be computed knowing $H(key\ \Vert\ message)$ and the length of $key\ \Vert\ message$ (with $pad$ trivially determined from that), for any known ...

4

Password hashes need first pre-image resistance and should not cause many collisions among typical passwords (preserve the entropy). This collision "attack" violates neither requirement and causes no practical security issues. While this issue can find trivial collisions, they're not between commonly chosen passwords. A SHA-1 hash (and thus the shorter of ...

4

HMAC and NMAC make assumptions of the underlying hash function $H$ for their security proofs. Additionally they are designed to eliminate known flaws in other MAC constructions using MD type hashes. NMAC is not $H(k1$ $||$ $H(k2$ $||$ $m))$, it actually uses the keys as the initial hash values, which require a higher level of access to the internals of the ...

4

The Keccak submission says: From the security claim in [12], a PRF constructed using HMAC shall resist a distinguishing attack that requires much fewer than $2^{c/2}$ queries and significantly less computation than a pre-image attack. Here, $c$ denotes the capacity of the sponge, i.e. the effective size of the internal state in bits. Since HMAC is a ...

4

Given that you use the SHA-3 hash (which is resistant against length extension attacks), would you still need to go through that procedure in order to produce a secure MAC? No, you don't need to do that, but you can. Needless to say we'd still use a key, which we prepend or append to the message, but is that sufficient for a MAC? Yes, you can ...

3

Decoding AES256-CTS-HMAC-SHA1-96 AES256 = AES using 256-bit key CTS = ciphertext stealing HMAC-SHA1-96 = HMAC using SHA-1 hash function with mac truncated to 96 bits. The benefits of HMAC truncation are discussed in FIPS PUB 198-1, chapter 5. For HMAC-SHA1 96 bits is very common truncation, used for instance by IPsec/ESP. For figuring out what key ...

3

I'll answer your question in order of appearance: HMAC can be used with any key size (as the key is basically used as input for the underlying hash function). If the key size is too small then the security of the HMAC is of affected. In general, the key size should be at least the output size of the hash algorithm divided by two. It is best practice to use ...

3

Your scheme would make a nice puzzle for amateur codebreakers. That's about the best that can be said for it. It does not meet the generally accepted standards for a modern encryption scheme; in particular, it is not semantically secure. In fact, the security of your scheme would be seriously compromised if an attacker obtained even a small amount of ...

3

"Encrypted hash" totally fails if the encryption uses a malleable mode like CTR. CTR runs AES in a stream-cipher-like mode where the data to encrypt is simply XORed with a key-dependent stream, so the attacker can flip bits with extreme precision; so if the attacker guesses the contents, he can modify them and fix the hash easily. More generally, if you ...

3

A key derivation function lets you derive keys from others. In this case I would use HKDF, which means using HMAC in a predefined way. Your key material is the keys $X$ and $Y$, so you can concatenate those to get the PRK for HKDF-Expand. An output key would then be $\operatorname{HMAC}(X||Y, \text{info} || \text{0x01})$, if the size of the HMAC is long ...

3

The answer to this question follows directly from the answers to Should we MAC-then-encrypt or encrypt-then-MAC? and the comment thread here. In short: Your scheme is computationally secure (IND-CCA2 and INT-CTXT) assuming that HMAC is a computationally secure privacy-preserving MAC; but your scheme is wildly impractical, as fgrieu explains, so it is not ...

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

From a security standpoint, HMAC-SHA256 is exceptionally secure, so the move is unlikely to relate much to cryptographic security unless they were using the construction incorrectly, which is improbable. I freely admit that I know almost nothing about Salesforce, but I can guess at the rationale behind the decision: since HMAC is a symmetric primitive, both ...

3

The generator in the question internally transforms the $512$-bit string designated tag into an output determined either: as $1/10^4$ of a non-negative integer less than $10^6$, whenever the "If the result is smaller.." clause applies; as $1/10^2$ of a non-negative integer less than $2^{12}$, otherwise. Determination process 2 occurs for ...

3

My question is: does it add any security to add a random salt to the message you are validating with HMAC? This depends on what the HMAC is used for. If you use a key to sign more than one secret message, a salt will prevent an attacker from knowing whether two of them are equal. (Or brute forcing a message if the key is revealed...) It is more common ...

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