# Tag Info

9

There's an obvious solution using DH: Alice has a private key $a$ and a public key $g^a$; Bob has a private key $b$ and a public key $g^b$. When Bob sends a message, he computes the shared secret value $(g^a)^b$, converts that into a MAC key (possibly using a nonce to prevent key reuse), computes the MAC of the message, and sends the message and the MAC ...

9

The server doesn't sign the data itself. It only signs part of the handshake if you're using a signing based suite. That means you can prove to a third party that a handshake with a certain server happened, and what data was exchanged in that handshake. If you're using a RSA encryption suite, it doesn't even sign the handshake, but authenticates indirectly ...

8

To complete what @CodesInChaos explains: If the server has a RSA key in a certificate which is suitable for encryption, then anybody can forge a completely fake conversation without the server being involved at all. In the SSL/TLS protocol, when using a "RSA" cipher suite, the client generates the random "pre-master secret" which it then encrypts with the ...

3

What you want is exactly one of the use cases of ring signatures. A ring signature scheme allows you to choose an ad-hoc group of public keys and compute a signature in such a way, that it could have been created by any holder of one of the corresponding secret keys but by nobody else. The privacy of the construction from the paper linked above is perfect. ...

2

With asymmetric cryptography, the sender is not able to encrypt it such that the receiver could have encrypted it without disclosing a private secret without performing a symmetric key exchange. Once you exchange a symmetric key however, you could symmetrically encrypt the contents of the message and the MAC and then encrypt the shared key with the public ...

2

I found the original question vague/ambiguous but the Bitcoin example is concrete enough to answer. In short, what you want is impossible without relaxing some of your requirements. One of the many requirements you list is that Alice, essentially, has no signing power and can only perform password-based authentication. This is problematic for a fundamental ...

1

There's no way in OpenPGP to MAC a message. You can sign it, but that's it. We could have a lively debate about the legal ramifications of a digital signature, and I'll take the side that it means less than you've been told it has. Like everything, context matters. I could give you a use case where there'd be an approximately 100% likelyhood that a digital ...

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