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3

The master key has to be stronger in the sense that it's more sensitive than session keys. The information used to derive session keys are not necessarily secret, so if it's easy to recover the master key, an attacker will be able to compute all the derived keys. On the other hand, recover a single session key will not help you to recover the master key ...

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I am using 32 character long random alphanumeric strings as the cryptographic keys First, I would suggest generating the keys differently. Cryptographic keys are not like passwords. There are specific requirements for the format of a cryptographic key, which depends on the algorithm. In the case of AES, HMAC, and most other symmetric algorithms, the ...

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Hashes and therefore HMAC do not take alphanumeric characters as input. You'd first have to convert the textual "key" into bits. I've put "key" in quotes because keys for HMAC should consist of bits in the first place. The recommendation for HMAC is (indeed) that the key size is identical to the output size (and the intermediate state for Merkle–Damgård ...

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The security level of a hash function is determined by its output size. In general, a hash function is considered cryptographically secure when it is collision resistant and provides security level $b = n/2$. Hence, it is not wrong to describe Lamport's scheme that way. However, the description probably was done that way to abstract away some details: If ...

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In general, you never want to use CRC/weak checksum for any computations on secret material (like keys). CRC is a linear function and by showing CRC of a key, you reveal a lot of equations that hold among the key bits. This is equivalent to showing the same number of bits of the key as the length of the checksum. The proper way of doing it has been ...

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