Passwords are secret keys which human beings can memorize.

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43 views

### Is it safe to use the same password for both VeraCrypt volume and Windows Login?

I encrypted my entire volume with Veracrypt which prompts on start up and asks for a password, great. Now after every startup is finished or everytime I leave the computer unattended (after a quick ...
102 views

### What's an algorithm for laypeople to make personal passwords

I'm going to be teaching an audience about algorithms. I'd like to give them one to create unique personal passwords for websites. They could start with the domain name of the site and their own ...
73 views

### Which passphrase length is good so it's hard to break bitcoin's PBKDF2 key?

According to https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawiki#From_mnemonic_to_seed To create a binary seed from the mnemonic, we use the PBKDF2 function with a mnemonic sentence (in ...
73 views

### How can I convince a legal person that when a password it is possible that it is stored in the plain?

If a used has a password on a system that is 28 ASCII characters, on a system, lets say it's my.gov.au and then a few years ago a flaw is discovered which limits passwords to 20 characters and the ...
35 views

### Hashed password used for encryption and for user authentication at the same time

As I am fairly new to cryptography, I would like to understand how to, in a simple way, implement a system that would achieve the following: the user would have to setup a password, which would then ...
79 views

### Concatenation of password and TOTP - possible issues

I have come across a two factor login mechanism using Time based OTP (TOTP). TOTP (6 digits) is shown to the user in an app. There are two ways of logging in. Method 1: User inputs the username and ...
108 views

### Is password hashing post-quantum secure?

Current computers cannot break reasonably strong hashed passwords, for example 14 CSPRNG-generated alphanumeric characters ($\approx$80 bits of entropy). Grover's algorithm applies to hash functions ...
78 views

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? ...
41 views

### Are there any best practices/recommendations for/against using client-side password hashing?

I do not mean generating a hash on the client side and then storing it in the database directly. I found a few questions with similar theme, but most of those answers assumed a scenario where ...
40 views

### Is there any “approximate or probabilistic” password authentication method?

I understand that the password-based authorization check procedure requires that you enter a password that is correct, that is, does not allow even a single bit difference. Suddenly I have this ...
2k views

### Make a Strong, Easy-to-Remember Password Using Classical Cryptography?

Passwords can be tough to remember. For example: H7535637353959595*9608J614625C1313^398583I0397897j^ So Bob wants to make and use a good password for GPG that he ...
239 views

### Crack AES encryption via passphrase dictionary attack?

How easy would it be to crack a AES-256 encrypted file, that is protected by a passphrase? I understand that the trying to brute force a AES-256 encryption key would be on the unfeasible side, even ...
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### Is it possible to convert hashed password from one bcypt version to another?

I have passwords hashed using bcypt version \$2a\$ (e.g. "\$2a\$06\$...") and I want to convert them to version \$2b\$(e.g. "\$2b\$06$..."). Is it possible to do that? If yes, are ...
3k views

### Password hash contained '\x00' in middle, resulting in ValueError from bcrypt.hashpw

I have some code that accepts a password in string format, and hash it with SHA3-512 before passing it to bcrypt for hashing. However, by some coincidence, I found a test case that produces a hash ...
495 views

### 7-Zip Encryption: Practical Effect of Lacking Salt

A previous discussion on Cryptography StackExchange leads me to understand that 7-Zip does not use salt to derive an encryption key from password to use its AES-256 encryption; that this is a ...
162 views

### Would hashing a password twice prevent naive attacks?

A common way of using MD5 or any other hashing algorithms to store passwords is to hash the password with a salt $$\text{hash}(\text{password} \mathbin\| \text{salt}).$$ This way, if an attacker wants ...
138 views

### BIP 39: If I mix my 24 seed phrase with another 24 words, will the checksum property allow an attacker to retrieve the original seed phrase?

Assume that I have a 24-word passphrase that I want to store securely but online by mixing it with another 24 words in a manner only I know. Does the checksum property somehow help an attacker to ...
119 views

### Why does the PAKE ideal functionallity allow the keys to be the same when the passwords differ?

My intuition for the security a symmetric PAKE is supposed to provide comes from the example of a login page. Both the user and the server know the password (assuming unhashed passwords), and the ...
99 views

### In Microsoft Password Monitor implementation using HME how do they perform ComputeMatch Function?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/password-monitor-safeguarding-passwords-in-microsoft-edge/ In this they mention The server then evaluates a matching function on the encrypted credential,...
114 views

### Do I need a salt for Scrypt if the data is client-side?

I have a web app, in which I am encrypting user data client side. Each client has their own password, which is used to derive an encryption key (via Scrypt) for encrypting their data. Since the data ...
339 views

### Is tagging the hash of a password along with ciphertext secure?

Suppose I have a password, in which I use Argon2ID with 1GB memory to derive an encryption key. Then, I encrypt my data using XChaCha20 using that encryption key. The problem with ChaCha is that any ...
73 views

I was looking at Dragonfly key exchange protocol RFC 7664, and it seems to make use of masked Diffie-Hellman in the final part. Generating two random numbers less than group order $q$, $m$, and $r$ ...
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### Why do some people believe that humans are "bad at" generating random numbers/characters like this?

I'm not even sure if they are serious, but I've heard many times that some people refuse to not only trust their computer to generate a random string (which is understandable) but also don't trust ...
241 views

### How long would it take all of the supercomputers or cloud computing on Earth to bruteforce a significantly long password?

I was arguing with a colleague who thinks that SHA256 (password + 64 character static salt) is "insecure." My argument is that nothing in cryptography is "secure," it's all a ...
67 views

### Is this method of salting effective?

So this is my first post on this forum, so bear with me if I sound stupid. I am creating my own web application with JavaScript and MongoDB. I am storing all user information in a Mongo table, and ...
124 views

### Can ECDSA signature signing and verification process replaces password hashed based login system?

ECDSA or DSA in general was to sign a message or data using private key and verify it using public key, if the attacker/imposter doesn't have the private key then they couldn't sign the message ...
66 views

### Where to obtain a common/weak password list (black list)?

The NIST 800-63B publication specifies recommendations regarding memorized secrets (passwords) https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html#memsecretver specifically section "5.1.1 Memorized ...
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### Number of combinations with a max. of successively repeated characters

I would like to calculate the possible password combinations for a password that is 60 characters long, has the letters a-f and numbers 0-9. Also no character should repeat successively more than 7 ...
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### What is the purpose of hashing the identifier in the secure remote password (SRP) protocol?

In the secure remote password protocol version 6a, the identifier for the user, I, is hashed along with the salt and the password on the client. While I understand ...
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### Is this mentally computable password system, cryptographically secure? And anything like this out there I can find?

Please bear with me on this, I'm not learnt in this field, just trying to ask questions about the security of my encryption method. I'm trying to create a mentally computable human password manager ...
496 views

### Recovery Passphrase Collission for BIP-39 and BIP-44

Referring to the standards of [BIP-39] and [BIP-44]: a 'master password' consisting of 12 words uniformly selected from a 2048-word dictionary corresponds to 128 bits of entropy, that is then used as ...
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### What grade of protection does a private key's passphrase provide at best?

Does a passphrase with high entropy provide the same level of security as the private key itself? General scenario: An attacker has access to a private key file that is protected with a passphrase ...
57 views

### How to be able to change the password to access data encrypted with AES-GCM, without reencrypting?

Let's say you need to encrypt plaintext which is 1 TB big. You have a password pwd. This very classical AES-GCM process is ...
457 views

### Why is SHA256/SHA512 not broken for shortish passwords

I don't get why SHA-256/SHA-512 hasn't been broken, at least for shortish (10-12 character) passwords It is perfectly plausible to pre-compute a password/hash-pair table using numerous very fast ...
20 views

### Is my password database encryption flow secure?

I'm not an expert and I would be very glad if someone could take a look at it and tell if there are any problems with it Things I know/think are problematic using base64 digest + getting the first 32 ...
60 views

### Are there any methods for constructing a password that can be reconstructed if forgotten and is as secure as randomly generated ones?

Is there a formal name for such a thing, so I know what to google? Is it possible to make them as secure as randomly generated passwords? An illustrative example would be something like picking a ...
40 views

### Should I use 2x the number of CPU / core for Argon2id parallelism?

I've read that I should use 2x the number of CPU available from some documentation while others suggest using between 1 and the number of CPU. I realize there is no hard answer here but I'm curious ...
218 views

### Is this password-cracking challenge possible?

Taking a graduate computer security class, part of our current assignment is to crack 50 Unix md5crypt password hashes, due on Thursday, October 8th (in eight days.) I've managed to crack 49 out of ...
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### What can be deduced/extracted from this local hash extracted from Windows Machine?

I'm new to cryptography. I've been experimenting with getting Windows hashes to see whether it's possible to reverse engineer. The following hash is what I got from my test laptop. What can you ...
625 views

### How to choose parameters for Argon2 for a password vault

I'm creating a password vault, and I plan to use Argon2id to derive the master key from the master password. For encryption, I plan to use XChaCha20 with Poly1305. To be clear: a set of multiple ...
127 views

### Is this cumbersome strategy to produce a ridiculously strong password valid?

I'm writing something where somebody wants to have a ridiculously strong password for a file and yet be sure that he will always be able to reconstruct it. The way I have thought of this might be a ...
2k views

### Cryptography elements needed for a story

Note: following Maarten Bodewes's answer, I edited this post to make it clearer. I'm writing something partly driven by the need to crack a few encrypted files. This is what needs to happen in the ...
2k views

### Good layperson analogy for password and encryption keys

NOTE: QUESTION UPDATED. SEE BOTTOM OF THIS POST. I'm writing something where I need to make someone come across as though they know cryptography. I don't know enough, but as cryptography plays only a ...
158 views

### How to calculate the entropy for a fixed length random passwords which has restrictions on the type of characters used

If we have a set amount of usable characters, but no other restrictions on the potential characters in a completely random fixed length password, we can easily calculate the entropy by doing: \$\log_2(...
280 views

### Is storing salts encrypted a good idea?

I've read that storing password hashes in a database, you can store the salt in plaintext alongside the actual hash with no detriment to security. I was thinking that one could derive a key from the ...
26 views

### Could someone please explain the implementation of public-private key encryption for storing passwords?

As someone new to cryptography,I have a question about how logins work on websites. I understand mathematically how asymmetric encryption works and how https web requests work to securely send ...
73 views

### How to provide secure password based encryption with password reset option

I am trying to build website that will encrypt some data for the user using his/her the output of scrypt on it, now the idea is that this schema is not flexible because if the user loose their ...
112 views

### What kind of a strategy can be used to crack this password?

The password is 11 chars. It has 5 letters and 6 numeric characters. There is at least 1 uppercase and 1 lowercase in it at the same time. Can an attacker benefit from these information even though he ...