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A DES key is, by definition, a (pseudo)randomly chosen sequence of 8 × 7 = 56 key bits, plus 8 parity bits,* for a total of 64 bits. If what you have isn't 64 bits long (with the appropriate parity bits), then it's not a DES key, but something else (e.g. a passphrase). To turn that "something else" into a DES key, you need a key derivation function ...

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This won't seriously impact the security of the key. HMAC is pretty resilient and changing the last part of the hash won't allow attacks on the a hash such as SHA-256. Note that you only select 4 characters, of which the last one only encodes 4 bits (as it is at the end). That means you've got a check value the size of 2^22 encoded bits, i.e. a chance of 1 ...

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There's really two things to consider here: Entropy. Assuming that the hash function in question maps exactly the same number $2^{n-k}$ of bit strings of length $n$ to each hash output of length $k\leq n$, then fixing $l\leq k$ bits of the hash reduces the set of possible choices for the input from $\{0,1\}^n$ to some subset $S\subseteq\{0,1\}^n$ of ...

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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 ...

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Your question is about breaking password hashing schemes (PHSs). The usual way to break password hashes is by brute-forcing the input until you find a match between the resulting hash and the obtained hash. Now there're some counter-measures to harden the schemes against various attacks that would allow you to break many passwords very fast, because most ...

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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 ...

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