B-Con

2,174 reputation

1418

bio	website	bradconte.com
	location	Texas, USA
	age	25
visits	member for	1 year, 9 months
	seen	10 hours ago
stats	profile views	18

I'm a software engineer. My specific interests are Cryptography and computer security. I graduated from UC Davis with B.S.s in C.S. and pure math.

My website: http://bradconte.com

	2,174 reputation	bio	website	bradconte.com	visits	member for	1 year, 9 months
1418 badges		location	Texas, USA		seen	10 hours ago

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Aug 24	revised	Why is padding used for RSA encryption given that it is not a block cipher? Edited the second question quote to reflect the updated second question in the OP.
Aug 24	revised	Why is padding used for RSA encryption given that it is not a block cipher? Added relevant tag. Removed unnecessary space.
Aug 23	comment	Making a cipher (ex: Vigenere) harder to break A standard substitution cipher is just a mapping between alphabetic characters. You could do the same thing for 128-bit blocks, find some way to make a mapping from a password. But I think @Codes comment may have been somewhat tongue-in-cheek since 128-bit block ciphers basically are just a random mapping between 128-bit blocks, where the map depends on the key. Calling that a substitution cipher doesn't really match the normal usage of "substitution cipher". But technically it could be considered so, and it would be an improvement, like you asked for.
Aug 23	comment	Making a cipher (ex: Vigenere) harder to break The 26-character English alphabet is about 4.7 bits large. You are basically substituting a values drawn from a pool 4.7 bits large. He is pointing out that instead replacing 128-bit blocks with other 128 bit blocks would greatly improve the quality of the substitution.
Aug 23	revised	Detect tampering of data Added relevant tags, removed non-applicable tag.
Aug 23	answered	Detect tampering of data
Aug 23	revised	Is it possible to pick your Ed25519 public key? o -> of
Aug 23	revised	Is it possible to pick your Ed25519 public key? Reworded opening paragraphs to be a little more direct.
Aug 22	comment	Difference in one time key and one time pad and many time key Whether a scheme is a one-time key or a many-time key depends on whether it is secure or not secure in the one-time or many-time models. ECB is not semantically secure in either model (if your message can be more than one block long).
Aug 22	revised	Is it possible to pick your Ed25519 public key? Re-ordered introduction, a few minor rephrases.
Aug 22	answered	Is it possible to pick your Ed25519 public key?
Aug 22	revised	Difference in one time key and one time pad and many time key Opening paragraph tweak, slight verbage tweak elsewhere.
Aug 22	revised	Difference in one time key and one time pad and many time key Added relevant tags.
Aug 22	answered	Difference in one time key and one time pad and many time key
Aug 22	awarded	Yearling
Aug 21	revised	RSA 1024bit decryption performance Added relevant tag.
Aug 16	comment	Can I use PBKDF2 for authentication and decryption? Indeed, probably not very much. We probably just want statistical collision resistance (aka, the wrong password has a low probability of succeeding).
Aug 16	revised	Can I use a key-derivation-function as the hash function H in SRP? Added tags for the most promenently mentioned standards.
Aug 16	answered	Can I use PBKDF2 for authentication and decryption?
Aug 14	comment	Homomorphic cryptosystems in RSA It wasn't directly asked in the question, but I felt obliged to edit my reply and add a quick caveat about security.