# Tag Info

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An ASN.1-encoded SSH private key contains the following integers in order: The public modulus $n$ and exponent $e$; The private exponent $d$; The prime factors $p$ and $q$ of $n$; The "reduced" private exponents $d_p=d\bmod(p-1)$ and $d_q=d\bmod(q-1)$; The "CRT coefficient" $q_{\text{inv}}=q^{-1}\bmod p$. The observation that the value of $d$ in such a ...

38

Surprisingly, very basic algorithms which the children learn at the basic schools are used. For instance: http://www.wikihow.com/Do-Long-Multiplication You can find a similar algorithm for sum, sub and division. Try to ask google for: "division on paper" The "power of" is little tricky. In cryptography you don't really need the "real power of". Instead ...

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The answer is in the source, file sshrsag.c, line 9: #define RSA_EXPONENT 37 /* we like this prime */ This value $e=37$ matches the conditions for a reasonable fixed RSA public exponent: $e$ is odd, $e$ is at least $3$, $e$ is reasonably small. The later condition is good for speed of operations involving the public key (encryption, ...

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There are two reasons by which such "huge" numbers can be computed in reasonable time. The first one is that we do not raise one integer x to some big exponent d. What we do is that we compute x raised to power d modulo an integer n. The modulo means that we are not interested in the final integer xd but only in the remainder of the Euclidian division of xd ...

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Is this number specified anywhere? It was formally specified in this RFC as the 1536 bit MODP group (although its use predates that RFC). However, from what I've seen, the 2048 bit MODP group from that same document is actually more popular. Why was this particular number picked? Well, it's a safe prime; in addition, the leading 64 bits and the ...

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This is a common mistake, so I'd like to give an in-depth answer. Basically, what you are proposing is to rely on the ONE-WAYNESS of RSA as a ONE-WAY FUNCTION, rather than relying on its CPA or CCA security as an encryption scheme. The advantage of using RSA as a one-way function is that no padding etc is needed. Now, the first important thing to note is ...

17

Yes. The McEliece cryptosystem using Binary Goppa codes has withstood cryptanalysis to date. Its hardness is based on decoding. I should note that it has been broken for certain classes of codes. Another common example is the Merkle-Hellman knapsack cryptosystem. Unfortunately it was broken. It is likely possible to build a secure cryptosystem based on the ...

16

However, factoring a large integer is extremely difficult, even for a computer using known factoring algorithms. Not categorically. Factoring a large integer is trivial if it is only composed of small factors. A fairly naive algorithm for factoring N is the following: while N > 1: for p in increasing_primes: while p divides N: N = N / p ...

15

If we want to compact an existing RSA private key expressed as $(N,e,d,p,q,d_p,d_q,q_\text{inv})$, we can reduce it to $(e,p,q)$ and easily recompute the rest as: \begin{align} N&=p\cdot q\\ d&=e^{-1}\bmod\operatorname{lcm}(p-1,q-1)\;\text{ or }\;d=e^{-1}\bmod((p-1)\cdot(q-1))\\ d_p&=d\bmod(p-1)\;\text{ or equivalently }\;d_p=e^{-1}\bmod(p-1)\\ ... 14 Anye$such that$\gcd(e, (p-1)(q-1)) = 1$will do. There is no need for it to be in the set$\{3,17,65537\}$; these last numbers are chosen for speed of encryption, mostly (two set bits leads to faster computation of modular exponentation), and these numbers happen to be prime, so the condition is easily checked. One often encounters other$e$, but many ... 14 The main reasons we usually choose$p$an$q$prime numbers are: For a given size of$N=pq$, that makes$N$harder to factor, hence RSA safer. Although efficient factoring algorithms do not find factors by trial division, it remains much easier to find very small prime factors than large ones. If we chose$p$and/or$q$at random without consideration for ... 13 Actually, if the RSA key generation is malicious, there are even more subtle ways that can someone can leak the key. The cleverest way I've seen works like this (assuming that we're generating an RSA-1024 key; for RSA-2048, we just use a larger curve): The attacker generates an EC public/private key pair; using a 192 bit curve for RSA-1024 is good. He ... 12 You can use a seed to start a PRNG. Then you can use that PRNG to generate the two (or more) primes required to generate the key pair. Now if you save that seed you can regenerate the key pair, which means you don't have the store the modulus, CRT components or private exponent. So yes, it is possible to reduce the size, but this approach does have ... 12 The security level of an elliptic curve group is approximately$\log_2{0.886\sqrt{2^n}}$. You can use this to approximate the security level of a$n$-bit key, eg:$\log_2{0.886\sqrt{2^{571}}} = 285.32537860389294$The real computation (at least for curves over a finite field defined by a prime$p$) is$ \log_2{\sqrt{\pi/4}\sqrt{ℓ}} $, where$ℓ$is the ... 11 It is feasible to generate 300 million public key pairs of reasonable strength in 8 hours on a single computer, easily with ECDSA using a single core/thread, and even with DSA using quite a common multi-core computer. RSA would require many standard computers (baring hardware accelerators for modular exponentiation), assuming all the public keys are made ... 11 First of all, yes, the message digest is the hash of the message. Secondly, do not mix things up. You are talking about public key encryption and signature. Let's redefine them to make sure we have everything right. Alice and Bob got pairs of key ($A_{pub}$,$A_{priv}$), ($B_{pub}$,$B_{priv}$). Alice knows$B_{pub}$and Bob knows$A_{pub}$. Alice wants ... 11 RSA moduli are generally of the form$N = pq$for two primes$p$and$q$. It is also important that$p$and$q$have (roughly) the same size. The main reason is that the security of RSA is related to the factoring problem. The most difficult numbers to factor are numbers that are the product of two primes of similar size. Note. There are basically two ... 11 In addition to McEliece (already mentioned by Mike), there's also Hash Based Signatures (such as this one); these are signature algorithms that is based only on some security assumptions of a hash function (and typical hash functions as about as far from numeric-theoretical problems as you can get) 10 Breaking such a scheme is easy. Suppose Alice wants to transmit a message$M$to Bob. First thing, Alice picks an integer$R_a$and sends the cipher text$C_a = M \times R_a$to Bob. Bob then picks another integer$R_b$and transmits$C_b = C_a \times R_b$back to Alice. Alice calculates$D_a = \frac{C_b}{R_a}$and sends$D_a$to Bob. Bob calculates$D_b = ...

9

If your calculator is able to compute $n^2$, you can compute $m^e \bmod n$ using the binary exponential method. In this method, you should first compute the binary form of $e$. Let $\ell$ be the number of bits in $e$, and let $e_i$ denote the $i$-th bit of $e$, so that $e=\sum\limits_{i=0}^\ell e_i \cdot 2^i$. Now, with the algorithm below, you can compute ...

9

This is not correct, the private key $d_A$ must always be an integer. Your mistake is that you are doing modular division e.g. $\frac{a}{b} \text{ mod } n$ incorrectly. You cannot simply divide the integers and then reduce by the modulus. The correct way to do this is to compute the modular inverse of $b$ i.e. $b^{-1} \text{ mod } n$ and then compute $a*b^{-... 8 For RSA, the answer whether it is feasible for a single computer depends on the reason your generating them (and specifically, whether they need to remain secure if you publish a number of them). For example, if you're generating the RSA keys to search for some criteria (e.g. the hash of the public key has a specific pattern), and you'll discard the ones ... 8 The use of the AES key many times is not a problem. However, there is a fundamental flaw with your solution. The server has no way of validating that it received the client's authentic public key. In particular, a man-in-the-middle can capture the client's public key, can forward its own public key to the server, and can then decrypt all traffic sent by each ... 8 You are looking at the ASN.1 encoding of private (and public) keys; the 00 values you see are an artifact of how ASN.1 encodes integers. ASN.1 is a method for describing data structures, and has ways to represents all sorts of data types. It wasn't designed with public keys (or cryptography) in mind; it was intended for more general use, initially ... 8 I work for Security Innovation, which owns the NTRU patents. All NTRU-related patents are freely usable under GPL 2.0 and 3.0 -- in other words, they should fit in with your license requirement as given above. If you have specific license requirements beyond GPL please let me know and we'll accommodate them if we can. There's an open-source C and Java ... 8 What does DH add? Perfect Forward Secrecy. That is, suppose you have a secure session with the server Bob, and then you close the session down. Then, someone steals the server (or serves a warrant to the owner). If you use RSA to transport the random session key, well, the server still has the RSA private key, and so they'll be able to decrypt your ... 7 Yes, it is possible to determine with some certainty which public key in some known set was used to produce RSA ciphertexts made with the same key in this set, given enough ciphertexts, and if neither the public moduli nor the random padding are made with intend to hide which public key was used. Assume that the set of$k$public keys have public moduli$...

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There is a method known as "Complex Multiplication". However, it is not simple at all, and tends to be overly expensive for most target orders. See this article for some details. There is also the (theoretical) concern that a curve constructed that way may have a special structure though could possibly be leveraged into an attack one day; generally speaking, ...

7

Yes, the basic idea of hardcoding a public key is secure. It is sometimes recommended as an alternative to the complexity TLS and PKI bring – otherwise it can be easy to skip a crucial step and end up with little or no security. However, the "encrypt a secret for server" scheme has some weaknesses compared to TLS. The clearest is lack of forward secrecy (...

7

In addition to the other answer Using asymmetric cryptography in the meters would have some benefits: it can make passive eavesdropping of meter/server communication useless, even to a party holding or able to use the server's private key; something not achieved with secret-key cryptography. it can ensure that any central key leak can not compromise the ...

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