# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged key-derivation

8

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 ...

6

One problem with RC4 is that, while it does take a variable length input (up to 256 bytes), it's known not to be great at mixing those bytes together. Specifically, we see correlations between the RC4 key and the RC4 output stream. My first recommendation to you would be to use something other than RC4. About the only advantage RC4 has over most other ...

5

I agree with the comments that SHA-256 should be fine here. However, if you already use HMAC-SHA-256 for PBKDF2, you could use HKDF Expand, which despite its name is defined even for output lengths shorter than input. In your case the output would be simply: $$\operatorname{HMAC-SHA-256}(\text{key}, \text{info} || \text{0x01}),$$ where 'info' is an ...

5

If I understand correctly, you want a function that for each input string $p$ assigns a permutation over an alphabet $L$. If the number of elements in $L$ is small enough, the permutation set $P(L)$ will be enumerable. More precisely, $|P(L)| = |L|!$. There exists a surjective function $f:\{0,1\}^k \to P(L)$ that for each bit string $s$ of length $k$ ...

4

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 ...

4

Given a EC public key, can a different, but plausible and functional private key be derived to match the public key? No, a public key will correspond to only one private key (with one minor exception, which I will explain below). With Elliptic Curve systems, the private key is an integer $d$ between 1 and $q$ (the order the generator point $G$), and ...

4

As far as I know (which, admittedly, might be limited; I do not claim to possess encyclopedic knowledge of attacks on KDFs), there are no known practical attacks against KDF1 or KDF2 (which are also mentioned on this page, following ISO-18033-2) when instantiated with a secure hash function. Regarding the relative security of these KDFs vs. HMAC-based KDFs ...

4

It is my understanding that a KDF adds entropy, whereas a hash loses information. Password Based KDFs can be seen as hash functions (or families of hash functions, depending on your definition), just ones with a lot of complexity. It is sometimes said that they "add entropy" but that usually means either they combine entropy from a salt into the ...

4

Poncho does a good job of explaining why you could use a KDF before RC4. But you are talking about a password and a PBKDF. A PBKDF does more than just provide a good way to extract entropy from the given input (the password): It uses a salt, which can be used to protect against rainbow tables (which could be created for known plaintext). This salt could ...

4

Yes. Salts are only there to make a particular key derivation globally unique. They have no requirement of secrecy.

3

When you use a PRF to derive a key, there is the potential for collisions. If you derived a 128-bit key from each possible 128-bit number, you'd expect some of them to collide. Specifically, you'd expect only about 63% of all the inputs ($1-e^{-1}$) to appear as outputs. That means you lose less than a bit of entropy even if the original key had the full ...

3

Short: In some simple cases, hash could be adequate. However, HKDF is intended to be a generic construct you can commonly apply for needs requiring Extract-Expand (such as when you have a shared secret agreed using DH or ECDH). It aims to be largely compatible with existing practices and thus makes it easy to apply the same pattern to multiple uses. It ...

3

1. To clarify: The critical time period here is one year (after wich the certs are changed). With the cracked RSA key the attacker can decrypt the traffic and do nan-in-the-middle attacks, posing as a valid hardware device. Let us take the numbers determined by experts. In their paper on cracking the 768-bit RSA key the researchers state that they needed ...

3

HMAC nor a KDF is needed here. As long as you always use a constant size key and "tag" (generally called a nonce, as in number-used-once) you can simply use a secure hash function, like SHA-256. My suggestion is to drop keeping track of the tags sent so far - this administration is bound to fail at some point. Instead, generate a 32 byte random number. This ...

3

Yes, this should be secure, as it is largely compatible with KDF1 and KDF2 which basically use a 4 byte big endian encoding of the counter instead of a direct ASCII conversion to a byte. Note that this construct works fine for master keys (short length, high entropy) but may be vulnerable to length extension attacks if larger input is allowed. However, if ...

2

From a security point of view, deriving lots of key material using PBKDF2 is ok. From a practical point of view, deriving lots of key material using PBKDF2 is inefficient (in the sense that to generate $n$ blocks and increase the adversary's work by $t$, you do work $nt$, instead of $n+t$). A more practical solution uses PBKDF2 to generate a short string ...

2

It's best practice to use the KBKDF to generate separate key material for validation as well as for generating the key used for encryption using a different input or counter of each key. If you do apply a KBKDF for each key / IV (using different ID's/counters for each) then you should not have any concern leaking any information. These KBKDF's are plenty ...

2

HMAC: The hmac version is considered slightly more secure than sha-256, assuming it's also based on SHA-256, because the HMAC formulation folds in the key material with 2 rounds of hashing, making it harder to use a chosen plaintext attack on the digest. SHA-256: SHA-256 should be relatively secure against chosen plaintext attacks, but it's better to be ...

2

You could 1. generate a key from the password, 2. seed a deterministic random number generator from the key, 3. use the random number to generate a permutation, using, e.g., Knuth's algorithm.

2

Here is the problem. For a specific ciphertext, sure you could try a bunch of keys and output the couple that result in the type of plaintext you want. But what does this really get you? For a different ciphertext, likely these same keys will not result in the same type of plaintext you desire. Recent work on honey encryption might be what you are really ...

2

Probably because a simple cascade would only be stronger against some attacks, while opening the door to more implementation bugs. While bcrypt and scrypt are (password based) key-derivation functions, much of what is in the answers to this question about combining hash functions applies here. Different constructions give preimage resistance and PRF-ness, ...

2

The once part inside of the nonce in CTR mode means effectively "once for this particular key". If you use a fresh key for each message (e.g. by encrypting it using public-key crypto or similar), you can use the same nonce for all the messages (or a size-zero nonce). The important part is that the combination of nonce and ctr-value (i.e. what is input into ...

2

It seems that you are trying to implement your own KBKDF (Key Based Key Derivation Function) using HMAC. Maybe it is better to use a pre-defined one. It would be more sensible maybe to use an HSM that is FIPS certified for NIST SP 800-108. These use one of the KBKDFs defined in NIST SP 800-108. You can still use the idea of the random by putting it in the ...

2

If you are concerned about database size, only the master key needs to be stored when you use HKDF. Ditto when sending it to another computer. Otherwise, two independent random keys are clearly secure and simpler to implement, so you should do that.

2

Is it subject to some class of attacks or is it just a really bad crypto nightmare which is only subject to brute-force attacks? You are calculating PBKDF2 twice, which takes twice as long. An attacker doing a brute force or dictionary attack only needs to calculate one of them to verify his guesses. That means you are making attacks twice as easy as ...

2

If you are certain that SecureRandom is a trusted, verified CSPRNG you can use that without HKDF without problems.

2

The algorithm produces a password based on the value of the time that is input as an argument. That value does not have to be the current time. For the purposes for which TOTPs are generally used, there is no value in producing the password for a time other than the current time step - it won't be recognized by the validator.

2

Depends on what you mean by Keccak. There is actually a slight issue here that not all 256-bit Keccak variants have 256-bit preimage resistance. SHA3-256 (in the current SHA-3 draft) does have 256-bit preimage, but if you are using Keccak with 256-bit capacity it only has 128-bit preimage resistance. At least some of the earlier documents had 256-bit output ...

2

Safe, yes, but it doesn't really give you anything. The only use for a salt is to mitigate precomputation attacks against a password. Since it is public, it gives you no extra MAC security. By the property of the MAC, no adversary can forge one without knowing the key, and by the security of your KDF (which includes the salt) no one should be able to get ...

2

As Trevis says, it's at least as safe: there's a simple reduction from the salted to the non-salted MAC, assuming the latter is secure in the standard "existential unforgeability under chosen message attacks". Assuming the adversary has full control of the salt, it also won't buy you anything security wise. In a slightly different setting, where the salt ...

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