# Tag Info

9

Cascading cipher gives a sense of security; and one that is technically justified with respect to the possibility that a weakness in one of the cipher would allow recovering the encrypted data. That's Bruce Schneier's argument, and it made sense in an era where DES, the then leading cipher, was a closed design, clearly deliberately weakened by a small key, ...

5

Well, whether $AES'$ is as secure as $AES$ depends on the length of $k_1, k_2$. If they are both 128 bit, then what you effectively have is a standard 128-bit AES, except that prior to round 6, you replace the running key with an independent key (and you tweaked the last round, but that's cryptographically harmless). Now, it is never a good idea to do ...

4

Step 1: good job, this is the right way. You can also use bcrypt or scrypt for extra resistance. Make sure you have chosen sufficiently strong parameters, that is, 64-bit salt and 10000 rounds absolute minimum. Step 2: no! once you have a strong derived master key, you don't need to apply PBKDF2 on any keys derived from this master key. You are just wasting ...

3

Your first option: Encrypted(Input) = AES256(key2, Serpent(key1, Input)) suffers from a textbook meet-in-the-middle attack. It only gives you one additional bit of security over AES alone / Serpent alone. Not a good choice if you're aiming for extra paranoia.

3

This is not a complete answer but it seems to me that it cannot be more secure than the original AES since otherwise it would mean that there is a serious weakness in the AES key schedule As far as being as secure there's at least one application in which it's a weakness : when you use AES inside a Davies-Meyer construction. An attacker has then more power ...

3

Does re-encrypting the same value with multiple keys reduce security? The answer is "it depends"; there are some attack models and encryption methods where the security is reduced, there are other cases where there appears to be no security reduction. Let us go through some models where we actually see a security reduction: Plaintext guessing attack ...

3

What you are asking appears to be 'is AES commutative'? The short answer to which is no: encrypting with AES with key 1 then key 2 will not (generally) give the same output as encrypting with key 2 then key 1, which is what would be required for naive implementation. However, there are modes in which AES can be used which would be commutative. For example, ...

3

Yes, you can reasonably expect that these will provide equivalent security, if you choose all keys uniformly and independently at random. The decryption operation is basically the same as the encryption operation, so it would be extremely surprising if there was any significant difference in security among these. (Of course, if you don't generate the keys ...

2

Short answer: (Probably) yes. Long answer: DES is a Feistel cipher, and therefore encryption and decryption are almost the same process. The only difference is the reverse order of the subkeys. There are theoretical attacks on DES, which might have to be adjusted if you use reverse order of subkeys for encryption. If these attacks target the subkeys ...

1

Start with “Shamir's Secret Sharing” concepts… Abstract. In this paper we formalize the notion of a ring signature, which makes it possible to specify a set of possible signers without revealing which member actually produced the signature. source: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.310.2876 In a nutshell: I have a secret S. ...

1

If by "encrypted" you mean generating a keystream, then what you propose is to use in the CTR mode $$C_i = P_i \oplus F_K(IV||i)$$ the following function $F$: $$F_{K_1||K_2||K_3} = E_{K_1}\oplus E_{K_2} \oplus E_{K_3}.$$ This is secure as long as you ensure that for each key all the used IVs are different (i.e. are nonces). As mentioned in another ...

1

You asked several questions above. I will address one in specific that stands out to me, and that is your question about XORing the keys together. Your statement that they might both have the same character at the same location that would yield a null byte is disconcerting: passwords are not normally used directly as encryption keys. Mathematically, a ...

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