# Tag Info

18

There is a great graphical representation of the possible problems that arise from reusing a one-time pad. Reusing the same key multiple times is called giving the encryption 'depth' - and it is intuitive that the more depth given, the more likely it is that information about the plaintext is contained within the encrypted text. The process of 'peeling ...

11

There are two methods, named statistical analysis or Frequency analysis and pattern matching. Note that in statistical analysis Eve should compute frequencies for $aLetter \oplus aLetter$ using some tool like this. A real historical example using frequency analysis is the VENONA project. EDIT: Having statistical analysis of $aLetter \oplus aLetter$ like ...

11

Well, the classical answer to "what is the correct thing to do after you have the XOR of the two original messages" is crib-dragging. That is, you take a guess of a common phrase that may appear in one of the plaintexts (the classical example against ASCII english is the 5 letter " the "), and exclusive-or that against the XOR of the two original messages ...

7

Yes, encrypting two different random "plain texts" with the same "pad" is indistinguishable from using two different random one time pads for encrypting the same plain text. You get perfect secrecy in the latter case, so you will get it in the former case as well. However, usually there is a functional difference between the key and the plain text that the ...

6

Yes, the attacker would have a realistic chance of recovering plaintext, and preventing him from knowing the IV values does not reduce this risk. The problem is that CTR mode encryption is effectively: $C = P \oplus F(Key, IV)$ where $P$ is the plaintext, $C$ is the ciphertext, and $F$ is a complex function of its two inputs. The problem with this is if ...

6

In general, knowledge of $m_1 \oplus m_2$ is not enough to uniquely determine $m_1$ and $m_2$, even if both are known to be, say, English text. For a simple example, $$\text{"one one"} \oplus \text{"two two"} = \text{"one two"} \oplus \text{"two one"}.$$ However, in practice it may be possible to obtain fairly good guesses for $m_1$ and $m_2$; the typical ...

5

If you encrypt the messages $m_1$ and $m_2$ with the pad $p$ as \begin{aligned} c_1 &= m_1 \oplus p, \\ c_2 &= m_2 \oplus p, \end{aligned} where $\oplus$ denotes the binary operation of a finite group (e.g. addition on integers modulo $n$, or XOR on bitstrings, etc.) and $p$ is a random element of the group, then, indeed, an attacker who ...

5

Well, reusing a key isn't a problem; after all, RSA keys are generally used many times. However, if you fix the padding, there does exist one other potential problem; message malleability. To example, suppose Alice sends two messages to Bob, $X_1, X_2$ and $Y_1, Y_2$. To send these, Alice actually sends: $E(X_1), E(X_2)$ $E(Y_1), E(Y_2)$ Now, Eve can't ...

4

Yes, this is a fine approach. This sort of technique is known as "key separation". Since your master key is a cryptographically secure key, you do not need to use a large iteration count. Also, you could use any PRF, in place of PBKDF2. (The iteration count is normally used if you are applying PBKDF2 to a passphrase, instead of a cryptographically secure ...

4

A recent (2006) paper that describes a method is "A natural language approach to automated cryptanalysis of two-time pads". The abstract: While keystream reuse in stream ciphers and one-time pads has been a well known problem for several decades, the risk to real systems has been underappreciated. Previous techniques have relied on being able to ...

3

You would retain perfect security in the situation you described. Consider your question in reverse. Use the ciphertext as a OTP and use the n-time-pad as the ciphertext. Since your ciphertexts are random their concatenated result is also random and would qualify as an OTP. At this point is doesn't matter what the OTP was, the conditions for perfect ...

2

The thing here is: When you just XOR the cyphertexts with each other, what you get is in fact the XOR result of both cleartexts. f(a) ⊕ f(b) = a ⊕ b And after that point, all that's left is to use statistical analysis, as ir01 has mentioned. In fact, the early cell phones used to implement a somewhat similar encryption scheme. They had a one byte (if ...

2

What you want is a key derivation function (KDF). Here's a fairly thorough list of some standardized ones. Ps. The suggestion given by user1852723 to use HMAC, with your "seed" as the key and a counter (or other non-repeating sequence) as the input, more or less corresponds to the "Counter mode KDF" construction described in NIST SP 800-108, with HMAC as ...

2

I think what you are looking for is a Password-Based Key Derivation Function (PBKDF). You can take a moderately strong password, like 12-14 random letters and numbers (no dictionary words though!), and throw it into the PBKDF function together with some other parameters, e.g. salt, number of iterations and the desired key length. After that you have a ...

1

Search for passwords on IT Security and you will find tons of advice on how to store passwords, and how not to. Your scheme is not a good method for hashing passwords: it is a fast hash, it lacks any salt, and it unnecessarily limits the password length. People have studied this at great length: before trying to re-invent the wheel, I suggest you read up ...

1

What you are looking for is a Pseudo Random Function that should be indistinguishable from uniform, even if the key material that is passed to it is not. One potential problem with your scheme is that the AES key schedule is not particularly good at extracting the entropy from keys that are not selected (pseudo-)randomly, such as passwords and pass-phrases. ...

1

can we assume that b breached number of keys, no matter what the quantity would not help an attacker discover the previous nor next key in the set without the original seed data? No, you cannot assume it. Whether that holds depends upon what key generation algorithm you use. For good key derivation algorithms it will be true; but if you choose an ...

1

The question and comments seem to be asking the following: If an implementation of RSA is used in the following way, is it still secure? An RSA modulus $N = pq$ and exponent $e$ are generated, and (N,e) is given to Party $A$ and $(p,q,e)$ is given to Party $B$. Then, the parties encrypt their communication where Party $A$ encrypts using the modulus and ...

1

Just happened to read the question and decided to write short answer. RSA is partially malleable (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleability_%28cryptography%29), it can be said that RSA provides efficient cryptography only if used very carefully. Therefore, RSA shall always be used via existing RSA padding schemes (see e.g. PKCS#1), because those have ...

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