# Tag Info

16

Even if the 32 characters are completely random, they won't contain non-printable characters. Actually, there are only about 107 printable characters in ASCII (out of 256 values for a full byte) and that even includes the space character. So if all the printable characters are used, it would result to a security level of about $log_2(107^{32}) = 215$ bits, ...

6

It's called a key derivation function because that's what you'd typically use its output for — as a key for some other cryptographic algorithm. (Of course, you can also use the output of Bcrypt for other purposes, e.g. storing it in a database as a password hash, but that's really a secondary use case.) In general, key derivation functions (KDFs) ...

6

From looking at the source or 7zip that seems to be the case. The format has a place for a salt, as SEJPM's link shows. It is mixed into the homebrewn iterated SHA-256 hash before the key. The 7zip decoder even seems to support salts. However, the encoder never uses a salt. Oddly there is even code for generating a random 4-byte salt, but it is commented ...

5

There are two things here: Encryption uses mode of operation, and not "AES alone". Some of them are randomized by an initialization vector - that means the encryption of the same text under the same algorithm is still randomized and not deterministic. The encryption methods take care of that. You only need the correct key to decrypt. Passwords are not ...

5

An important principle in cryptography is "key separation" which holds that one should "use distinct keys for distinct algorithms and distinct modes of operation". Violating key separation often opens up avenues of attacks that may break confidentiality, integrity, or even recover the key. You can use a KDF to derive cryptographically independent keys from ...

4

There's actually an algorithm designed exactly for this purpose: generating a sequence of keys from one master key. It's called HKDF (HMAC-based Key Derivation Function, paper here). The algorithm essentially boils down to two steps: Extract and Expand. The Extract step accepts any type of "key material" as input, and outputs a pseudorandom key that will ...

4

So is 2 the private key here ? No, it's referred to as a "shared secret" (because it is shared between Alice and Bob, and is secret to everyone else). If there were 'private' and 'public' keys (which is not the standard terminology with DH), then Alice's private key would be $a=6$, and the public key would be $g^a = 8$. In this case, the 'private key' ...

4

If you are using the full HKDF each time, you could possibly save time by only using the Extract portion once and Expand once per derived key. That could even halve the total time taken, if you had a worst case situation. Another speedup possibility within HKDF is to use another hash. Either a faster hash or one that matches the required key length better. ...

3

TL;DR: You put less of a burden an any attacker trying to brute-force this. And please note: Implementing PBKDF2 shouldn't be much harder than implementing your approach. Now let's head over to the explanation why "your" scheme is really bad for password-hashing. The scheme you propose is that each try cost you exactly two hash-function evaluations. One ...

3

This scheme is vulnerable to a "truncation attack", which allows an attacker to forge new ciphertexts (EN-FILEs). Here's how this works. Assume that the attacker controls a section of the plaintext and can predict (with reasonable probability) the plaintext prior to that section. In another words, a value $A \| B \| C$ is encrypted, where $A$ is ...

3

AES can have key lengths of 128, 192 and 256 bits. ASCII characters are usually stored in bytes, each byte having 8 bits. But strictly speaking, ASCII only has 7 bits. Thus, concatenating the yields a number consisting of 224 bits or 256 bits. But only 224 bits is not a valid length for an AES key. Since the characters will be entered by a human, that ...

3

Yes, it is possible to deterministically generate public/private RSA key pairs from passphrases. For even passable security, the passphrase must be processed by a key-stretching function, such as Scrypt (or the better known but less recommendable PBKDF2), and salt (at least, user id) must enter the key-stretching function; the output can then be used as the ...

3

I don't think it is a good idea, for two main reasons. Firstly, you are basing your security on the obscurity of a parameter that was not designed initially for being secret, which is a risky practice. It is similar to hiding the salt. Secondly, following your example, you may in principle think that a random number of iterations between 10 and 100,000 is ...

3

Yes, the output should have an entropy of 512 bit (or slightly less). Using it as a key is a good idea. If you want to generate more than 512 bits of key material out of the 512 bit you need to use a Key Derivation Function (KDF). You do not need to stretch the key, because it is no password and has a high amount of entropy - enough to make any brute force ...

3

Simple solution (with symmetric encryption): Assign each device an ID (probably already present) Store a master key on the server Use a KDF on the master key and the device ID to generate the key for the device. Then you only need the device ID on the device, and the server can re-create that key as required with the master key and the device ID. Of course ...

3

You don't actually need 384 bits of key material. The IV for GCM does not need to be secret, and may be chosen deterministically, e.g. as an incremental counter. Thus, you only need 256 bits for the AES key, which you already have. That said, if you did actually need more key material, you could use any standard KDF to expand your 256 bits. Since you ...

3

Instead of generating the random key for the one time pad cipher over and over again, is there a mathematical formula that allows you to switch the key to a new key? No. (Please keep reading…) A single mathematical formula won’t cut it. That’s where cryptographic algorithms come in. There are more than a handfull of cryptographically secure ...

3

From the linked page, a minikey is a 30-character string over the base58 alphabet with the first byte fixed to 'S', so effectively 29 characters. This gives a space of $log_2(58^{29}) \approx 169.88$ bits. Assuming that SHA is a random function, the probability of the hash starting with an 0-byte after appending a ? is 1/256, so this check loses 8 bits of ...

3

Coming up with a specific number is hard. Realistically, all three options take you well out of the realm of ever having more than the absolute worst passwords brute-forced by an attacker. The primary gain of scrypt and argon2 over bcrypt is a hit to parallelism due to the addition of memory requirements. GPUs with thousands cores will need (but don't have) ...

2

$s$ is a shared secret key. It's known to both Alice and Bob. You could call is a private key, but the usual terminology is “secret key” here, for no deep reason. Alice has a private/public key pair: $a$ is her private key, $A$ is her public key. Ditto with $b$ and $B$ for Bob. These values are not useful in isolation though; in normal use, the only point ...

2

Well PBKDF is for deriving keys from passwords, you don't need it if your master keys are already safe, just use something like HKDF. (faster) ECDH and DH are certainly the most secure options you have for negotiating session keys. Of course, as you do have a pre-shared master secret you have some interesting new options. Your usage of the HMAC sounds ...

2

PBKDF2 is an acronym for Password Based Key Derivation Function, #2. As you already have a key you need a Key Based Key Derivation Function or KBKDF instead. Currently the most up to date one is probably HKDF, which was - very quickly - also recognized by NIST. There are other KDF's such as KDF1 and KDF2 which are easier to construct (not many libraries ...

2

Key stretching is only used to make small-entropy keys less vulnerable to brute force attacks. If it is (nearly) impossible to break the original key, than there's little sense in using a iteration count of more than 1. If the input to the function is as big (in sense of entropy in bit) as the output, then an attacker could just attack the algorithm which ...

2

That's because AES is not a password-based encryption algorithm. It's a block cipher. It may seem like a detail, but such details matter. In cryptography, and in security in general, details often matter. AES is a pair of functions, each of which takes a key and a 128-bit message and produces a 128-bit message. The two functions are called encryption and ...

2

This is a summary of the indicated section of Cryptographic Extraction and Key Derivation: The HKDF Scheme from user4982's comment. Because this is in the context of an academic paper describing a HMAC based KDF, the terminology can be a bit excessive. I have tried to trim it down in this summary. Definition of a KDF: A KDF takes four inputs: a key ...

2

How they work Public and private keys work as follows. Every party who wants to communicate with others generates a private key which they keep secret. From that private key, they derive a public key, which they publish for anyone to see. For example, if we have three agents, Alice, Bob, and Charlie, they will all have a secret key S_A, S_B, and S_C and a ...

2

Your key derivation function is not particularly memory hard. The second loop walks the array in order, so an optimized implementation which an attacker would use can avoid the whole array, keeping only some elements in memory at a time. For example, you can halve the memory use by only storing the second half of M initially. Then for the first N/2 ...

2

Yes, this is exactly what KDFs and PRFs are designed for. That is, no reasonably efficient attacker will be able to tell if you used an actual random key or something generated from the KDF/PRF. This is of course assuming that your initial seed/master secret was of sufficient entropy, and the way you derive the various values are not done in a silly way. ...

2

Yes and yes, as mentioned in the comments. It is worth noting that Bitcoin wallets use a scheme similar to this in BIP32, a method of creating n various EC keypairs from a single seed deterministically: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki

2

Collisions are not much of a concern, since you have to compute them to know they happen, and assuming your values are a typical hash size (256+ bits) they will never happen randomly anyway. But yes, having identical computation that use the same data is wasteful if you don't store the intermediate values. However, the main problem your function has is that ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible