Questions tagged [entropy]
Entropy is a measure of how predictable the outcome of a random process is, or how much uncertainty one has about an unknown quantity in one's state of knowledge, defined in terms of the probability distribution on possible outcomes or quantities.
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Manual entropy collection from sources with an arbitrary base
I'm writing a tool for manually collecting entropy from sources like coins and dice, and I'm wondering how to best deal with the case where the desired number of bits of entropy is not representable ...
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How large should a seed possibility space be to generate a secure ECDSA key pair?
I have a function that generates a random 16 character length (upper + lower case letters plus numbers) seed password:
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From Entropy's perspective how Encryption affects a Message?
How Ciphers, specifically, Substitution Ciphers and Transposition Ciphers manipulate the Entropy of Plaintext w/wo the aid of Entropy Source?
Reversely, how Decryption manipulates the entropy of ...
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How strong should my password manager's master password be?
I use an offline password manager, I want to use a future proof very strong master password and I'm going to choose one of these options from the EFF's large wordlist, a randomly chosen 8 word ...
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Alternative definition of secret sharing using entropy
I ame reading the paper "Secret-Sharing schemes: A survey" by Amos Beimel. Here there are two definitions of secret sharing.
The first one states:\
A distribution scheme $\langle \Pi,\mu \...
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Can someone give a comprehensive guide on how to run NIST SP 800 90B entropy assessment c code in windows? [closed]
I am trying to run the github code in windows 11. I don't know what all I need to install in my laptop to run the C++ code. It would be a great help if someone can point out the steps to run the code.
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Does PBKDF2 HMAC 512 really only produce a maximum of ~128 bits of entropy? Regardless of input?
Andreas Antonopoulos effectively states: an input of 256bits of entropy into PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA512 will ONLY output a 64 byte hash containing ~128 bits of entropy. He states the algorithm essentially ...
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A HRNG that is NIST 800-90 compliant is not suitable for use for OTP generation right?
A HRNG that is NIST 800-90 compliant must use a DRBG in some way regardless of whether it adheres to a RBG1, RBG2 RBG3(XOR), or RBG3(RS) construction. This violates the requirement that the OTP is ...
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Why does NIST SP 800-90C RBG3 construction require XOR or reseeding a DRBG with a physical entropy source to produce full entropy?
NIST 800-90C defines 3 classes of random bit generation (RBG) constructions: RBG1, RBG2 and RBG3. All constructions must include a DRBG from NIST SP 800-90A. The particular construction in question is ...
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Would sending audio fragments over a phone call be considered a form of cryptology?
I have been wondering if sending audio fragments over a phone call would be considered a form of cryptology.
Let's say that you own two mobile phones and say that one of your phones is on the Verizon ...
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Predicting compromised OpenSSL 3.0 DRBG
The OpenSSL 3.0 rand function's DRBG uses the getrandom() system call to get 48 bytes of secure entropy from the kernel. It also ...
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Maximum entropy of a hash function?
Let $H(h,k)$ be the expected entropy of some random oracle $X:\left\{0,1\right\}^h \to \left\{0,1\right\}^k$, where $h$ does not necessarily equal $k$.
Then, is it true that $\lim\limits_{h\to\infty}...
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Proving the minimal entropy of Dilithium-QROM?
I am working with the securit yof CRYSTAL's Dilithium signature in the QROM. I am working with Kiltz et al.'s approach through lossy ID-schemes and looking at the proof of minimal entropy for the $DFS[...
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Hashing a seed full of entropy with a cryptographic hash function and emiting a key with the same size as input: can a collision attack occurs?
I read this in the documentation of HighwayHash:
By contrast, 'strong' hashes such as SipHash or HighwayHash require
infeasible attacker effort to find a hash collision (an expected 2^32
guesses of m ...
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Conditional entropy between ciphertext, plaintext and the key
If we have a (possibly imperfect) cryptosystem that generates ciphertext $C$ from plaintext $P$ and key $K$, we have:
$H(C, P, K) = H(C | P, K) + H(P, K)$
where $H$ is entropy.
My question is why ...
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How to calculate probability of cracking a password from entropy?
I am working on a project for my maths assessment where I research the effect of complexity and length on a given password. Currently, I am working on calculating the probability of guessing a ...
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Entropy for TLS 1.2: how much is needed for linux servers?
I am trying to fix issues with a server where the server keeps freezing up and needs to be restarted. I recently started hearing about entropy and it importance to secure tls keys in linux. The one ...
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Entropy of a counter
I wondered whether my understanding of entropy is correct, that a 256-bit counter that starts at 0 and counts to 2^256 - 1 by a <...
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Examples of frauds discovered because someone tried to mimic a random sequence [closed]
[Moderator note: this question now lives there]
So, I'm preparing a talk about the well known fact that humans are bad at the task of generating uniformly random sequences of numbers when asked to do ...
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Can I use a cryptographic hash function such as sha256 for Randomness Extraction [duplicate]
I want to transform a semi random input to a shorter, uniformly random bit string. Assuming there is enough entropy in the semi random input, can I use a collision resistant hash function to extract ...
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Hashing a seed together with a block counter and using as a encipherment scheme: Will this have the same security in bits as the seed used?
A user of this forum said that the whole entropy of a seed goes to the hashed result if using a counter and also that is suitable for key generation even if the internal state or digest size of the ...
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Configuring entropy source for OpenSSL [closed]
I'm using OpenSSL 1.0.2 and FOM 2.16 and am trying to figure out a way to draw entropy from Intel (RDRAND/RDSEED) if it's available, and from the Linux OS (/dev/random or /dev/urandom) if it's not. ...
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How does combining data affect the resulting file entropy?
If i add a password which has (X) bits of entropy as a tag to a picture which has (Y) bits of entropy, will the resulting image have an entropy equal to (X + Y) ?
How many bits of entropy i get if i ...
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Does hashing a secret/seed make it effectively 2X less secure?
In many cryptocurrency projects I noticed that 32-byte seeds/secrets are hashed to arrive at new 32-byte keys.
The reason why is because you can then, with the addition to an index, use the same seed ...
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Password entropy requirements for online dictionary attacks on OPAQUE?
My understanding is that for PAKE protocols such as OPAQUE (https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/163.pdf), the the adversary has no choice but to just do online attacks on the password. If this is true, I ...
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How to calculate entropy of a specific cryptosystem?
I want to calculate the entropy of a specific cryptosystem such as the Caesar cipher or Vernam cryptosystem etc but I don't quite understand how to do so. Any help?
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What are the key difference between Shannon entropy and Guessing Entropy?
Any body can explain, what are the key differences between Shannon entropy and Guessing Entropy? In some research I got entropy uses binary search or balanced Huffman tree. Guesswork uses linear and ...
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For any numbers $a, b$, what are the operators $X, Y$ such that revealing $a\ X\ b$ and $a\ Y\ b$ doesn't reveal info about $a,b$?
Previously I thought about a pair of 8-bit uniformly distributed random numbers $(a,b) \in \{0,1\}^8$, and $X$ to be bitwise XOR, $Y$ to be 8-bit addition. But it turned out that revealing $a \text{ ...
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What does $(a+b) \bmod{256}$ and $a$ XOR $b$ reveal about $a, b$?
Say $a$ and $b$ are some uniform random $8$ bits so that the entropy of $a$ and $b$ is 8 bits each.
If I show you $(a+b) \bmod{256}$ and $a$ XOR $b$, then what can you tell about $a$ and $b$? Or how ...
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What is the methodology for selecting symbol bit length and window size when performing Shannon Entropy Analysis?
When performing Shannon Entropy analysis on something like an RNG or a file, you must:
Select a symbol bit length and number of samples would will perform analysis on at a time (IE: windows size)
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Mapping number into number with big algorithmic entropy - how to do it?
I need to parameterize some PRNG, let's assume I need 32-bit numbers. But when numbers doesn't look very random it gives bad results. The creators of SplitMix had similar problem (note that from what ...
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Extractor and Min-Entropy proof
I'm following a course that speaks about cryptography. In this course we talked about Min-Entropy ($H_{\infty}$) and Extractor. To show that an extractor $Ext:\{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}^l$ that ...
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Which hashing function is good enough for session IDs?
Background
I'm building a URL shortener, and the URL to shorten may contain a SessionId.
For the URL shortener to not compromise the security of the SessionId, I must use a shortening strategy that ...
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Where did Whitfield Diffie say "If you can make random numbers, you can have a private conversation"?
I've seen the following (alleged) quotation on this site and other places:-
If you can make random numbers, you can have a private conversation.
-Whitfield Diffie.
Yet we (Google & me) can't ...
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Could anybody help by applying a secure multiparty secret sharing scheme?
Suppose that we have a multi-secret sharing scheme as it is described in the literature
Let there be $I$ agents and say that $S$ is the space of the (uniform) random variables $s=(s_1,s_2,\cdots,s_I)\...
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Is the Secret sharing scheme thresholds of variable of interest shared related with the entropy of the variable?
Is the $t$ out of $n$, namely $(t,n)$, threshold in the secret sharing scheme related to the entropy of the random variable that is shared according to the scheme?
What changes in the secret sharing ...
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Why Entropy to be defined as Joint Probability Distribution Sum?
From Stinson's book, during the demonstration of the following Theorem which says:
$H(X,Y) \leq H(X) + H(Y)$, with equality if and only if $X$ and $Y$ are independent random variables.
The author ...
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How can a generate a key with defined key size with a hash function with its security/internal state shorter than the key?
Let's suppose I took a high resolution photo full of entropy and I want to convert in a key with 2048-bits of security.
Practically all the known hash algorithms have maximum 512-bits of security.
Is ...
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Entropy of SIM PIN code
Each mobile SIM card has a four-digit number ($b_1$,$b_2$,$b_3$,$b_4$) called PIN code. Each digit $0 \le b_i \le 9$ (for i = 1, 2, 3, 4) is generated using a random 16-bit sequence as follows:
$b_i=(...
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Difference between Non-uniformly random and Uniformly random
I am reading up on Key Deriving Functions (KDF) and in a section of the Real-World Cryptographic book by David Wong, a comparison is being made with Pseudorandom number generator (PRNG). And one of ...
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Signature of low-entropy data: can they be faked?
I am working on an application where I have a physical product identification label containing a block of public, low-entropy data (~50 bytes) such as serial number and other info, all readily ...
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To what degree does a high PKBDF-HMAC-SHA1 iteration count compensate for a weak passphrase entropy?
Lost a LUKS-encrypted laptop at the end of 2019 and now trying to figure out the odds of a very sophisticated attacker being able to break in.
The LUKS container was created mid-2017 with LUKS1 ...
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What can chaos provide to cryptography?
Chaos-based cryptography is facing a lot of criticism, however, some people argue that it can provide many cryptographic primitives, such as stream ciphers, block ciphers, hash functions, public-key ...
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Estimation of the entropy of keys derived from truly random numbers
NOTE: This question is based on my assumption that $X$ is a "truly random number" if and only if it's length measured in bits is equal to its entropy measured in bits. In other words, when ...
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l-Diversity logarithm
I wanted to make a little example for anonymization evaluation using l-Diversity. For that I'm using the following formula for Entropy l-Diversity ($E$ is the equivalence class, $S$ are all possible ...
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Don't human generated passwords used with key derivation functions reduce the security of symmetric encryption?
The key size for AES is chosen as 256 because that's considered the minimum keysize which can protect against a brute force attack - i.e. $2^{256}$ tries.
However, in practice, for a lot of ...
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Does grouping password characters for readability decrease entropy?
For example, for a randomly generated password of 28 lowercase letters, which is about 128 bits of entropy, how would adding a space after every four characters affect it?
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Randomness extraction on correlated data in TRNG
True random number generator (TRNG) designs I read about mostly consist of two digital stages:
Low-frequency sampling (of a physical noise source)
Randomness extractor
The noise signal is sampled at ...
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Randomness extraction from a Santha-Vazirani (semi-random) source
In a quest to better understand randomness extractors (in the context of TRNG post-processing), I read some papers about the von Neumann Extractor and Santha-Vazirani (SV-) sources. The von Neumann ...
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Correlations in ring oscillator PUFs
A bunch of silicon Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) designs rely on variations of the propagation delay (due to process variation) of signals in different path. In many cases, a challenge selects ...
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