# Tag Info

52

The main difference is that secp256k1 is a Koblitz curve, while secp256r1 is not. Koblitz curves are known to be a few bits weaker than other curves, but since we are talking about 256-bit curves, neither is broken in "5-10 years" unless there's a breakthrough. The other difference is how the parameters have been chosen. In secp256r1 they are supposedly ...

48

Curve25519 was designed to take advantage of the Montgomery ladder, which combined with Montgomery curves forgoes the $Y$ coordinates, is side-channel resistant, and enables public keys to be any 255-bit string. The ladder looks something like this (pseudocode): Q[0] = P; Q[1] = 2*P; for(int i = log2(exponent) - 2; i >= 0; --i) { Q[ bit(exponent, i)] =...

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I restrict to hash functions $H$ with an output of some fixed size $n\ge1$ bit(s), accepting as input some strings, including all $n$-bit strings; MD5 (resp. SHA-1, SHA-256) is an example of such function for $n=128$ (resp. $n=160$, $n=256$). Whether there exists a solution to $H(x)=x$ depends on the particular hash function. If $H$ is a random function (as ...

33

This question is quite broad by specifying a sudden fall to cryptanalysis and therefore my answer might not be as complete as you wish it to be. If by "become practically attackable, or close enough that use is strongly discouraged" you imply not an academic breach but assume a weaker attacker such as a single ciphertext attack, then there are quite a few ...

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What you seem to be looking for is deniable authentication. This is actually a somewhat stronger property than what you're asking for: it guarantees that the recipient (let's call him Bob) cannot cryptographically convince anyone else that the sender (let's call her Alice) signed the message, even if he discloses all his private keys, simply because the ...

26

When NIST introduced SHA-0 in 1993, they – for the first time – switched their naming convention from MD-n to SHA-n Actually, MD-n was not NIST's naming conventions; it was RSA Security's (a private company) naming convention. Before SHA (which was the original name; SHA-0 is retroactive terminology given to distinguish the original proposal from what was ...

22

The curves secp256r1 and secp256k1 have comparable security. If we consider only the best known attacks today, they have very close security. Both curves are defined over prime fields and have no known weakness, therefore the best attack that applies is Pollard's Rho. Its complexity is: $\sqrt{\frac{{\pi}n}{2m}}$ where $n$ is the order of the curve (if it's ...

22

Yes, AES-NI was specifically designed to be constant-time and thus offers better side-channel protection than (some) software implementations. Note however that these day there exist quite fast side-channel resistant software implementations for AES, which are in-use by the better crypto libraries. AES-NI mainly offers a speed advantage over these ...

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No, because even SHA-512 was considered overkill from a security perspective. It has 256-bit collision resistance, which is unbreakable. (The link is about keys but a similar argument applies.) If you think large quantum computers will be efficient, a 512-bit hash makes some sense, but even then a 1024-bit one wouldn't. A quantum computer requires $O(2^{n/3}... 20 As otus suggests in the comments, it's better to first calculate the frequency of each letter in the decrypted message, and then compare the frequency distribution to what would be expected for English text. For the comparison, you can use chi-squared ($\chi^2$) testing. (Actually, for just comparing the likelihoods of different decryptions, you don't even ... 18 As of now I can think of four different applications for XOFs. Note that some change the padding depending on the requested output size and so the outputs are truly unrelated, Skein does this. Signature message hashing. Using an XOF you don't have to rely on ad-hoc constructions for hashing the message in signature schemes to the appropriate size. For ... 17 A simple way to imagine the effect of the hash function is a truncation. A "good" hash function ought to behave like a random oracle. If your source has entropy$s$bits, then this means that the source somehow assumes$2^s$possible values. When processed with a random oracle with an$n$-bit output, you force the$2^s$input values into$2^n$possible ... 17 Full disclosure — I'm a Skein/Threefish co-author. Also, when I mention Skein/Threefish without any other qualification, I mean Skein/Threefish-512. The security proofs we did for Skein prove that if there's a weakness in Skein, it implies an underlying weakness in its components (Threefish or UBI). As Dmitry says above, Threefish is very strong, and there ... 17 Informally, a signature scheme with message recovery is one where some or all of the message is embedded in the signature. That can reduce the size of the signed message, sometime by a proportion approaching 2, e.g. for RSA public-key certificates. Common practice: Signature scheme with appendix Space saver: Signature scheme with total message recovery ... 16 Randomness is not a property of strings of bits (or characters of any sort). Rather it is a property of the process that generates those strings. However, it is convenient to conflate the string with the thing that produced the string, and thus to speak about strings being “random” or “not random”. The string 00000, for example, is random if it was the ... 16 This is true of any group of prime order, over elliptic curves or not. This is due to Lagrange's Theorem which states that the order of a subgroup$H$of group$G$divides the order of$G$. Since orders are elements of the ring of integers and since this is a principal ideal domain, unique factorization exists and primes make sense. Or put another way, ... 16 With regards to timing-based side channels (those that can potentially be exploited remotely, as opposed to, say, power analysis), the AES-NI opcodes are constant-time. See for instance Intel Intrinsics Documentation, that describes the C-like function that can be used to leverage these opcodes: the opcode throughput and latency are fixed, which means "... 16 The Applied Cryptography Second Edition goes back to 1996. Although there is a 20th-anniversary edition, 2015, it is not updated as one thought. If you look for Schneier's style, you may look at the Cryptography Engineering: Design Principles and Practical Applications, 2010 There is also another nice practical book by Jean-Philippe Aumasson Serious ... 15 First, a bit of background. If we refer to the size of an elliptic curve group as$n$, we select an elliptic curve with$n = hq$, where$q$is a large prime, and$h$is a small integer called the cofactor; it is typically either 1, 4 or 8. The values of$q$and$h$will be part of the curve definition. As you know, with straight DH, we agree on a point$G$... 15 The first part of this partial self-answer uses additional information I received from Professor Simon R. Blackburn, one of the author of the recent attack. The method used to generate parameters is not public, e.g. for the matrix$m\in GL(n,\mathbb F)$which careful choice was acknowledged critical to defeat an earlier version of the attack. The authors of ... 14 Both of the other answers tackle the question of encryption in a particular format, but I would argue that neither of them is necessarily a good fit for your use case. You want to be able to generate 20 character codes that a server will be able to verify. A symmetric MAC is sufficient for this use case, if you don't need the codes to contain any secret ... 14 Lets say Alice wants to send Bob a sensitive message, she wants to prove to Bob that it came from her, but she doesn't want Bob to be able to prove that to anyone else. A MAC is a good way of doing this. If Alice and Bob share a MAC key (and only they have it) then Bob will know any message authenticated with that MAC key came from Alice, since he knows he ... 14 In addition to the (good) response of kodlu, let me clarify a point which, I think, is the source of the confusion. Springer, IEEE, Elsevier, etc, are publishers. What this means is that they are responsible for the edition/printing process for journals and conference proceedings. Since they do the publishing and sell the resulting journal, they put their ... 12 The Secure Hash Standard and corresponding FIPS-180/202 do not specify any hash to meet a security requirement above 256-bits (using a 512-bit hash). This is unlikely to change. SHA-2 was built with state and word sizes to meet the security requirements on commodity computers (x86 and Alpha), which use 32 and 64-bit maximum CPU word sizes for general ... 12 What choice did they have? F1 is a bitwise function with three inputs and one output. There are$2^8 = 256\$ such functions. Only 70 of them are "unbiased" (i.e. have as many 0 and 1 outputs in their image). If you further require that each input, as well as the order of inputs, matters for the output, you are left with only 36. However, those 36 are all ...

12

The reference on SHA(-0) is FIPS 180 (archived scan) of 1993 May 11. The standard itself is referenced on the NIST website, but that links to another scan lacking page 1 and the one before, thus foreword, abstract, explanation... There's also this text draft of 1992 January 22 (also here with less indication on origin). The Proposal for Change of that ...

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Pure Threefish has received less attention than Skein. Shortly speaking, it has a large security margin, and can be safely used for encryption. In more details, Threefish has been tweaked twice. The first two versions were vulnerable to rotational cryptanalysis in weak models (related-key attacks or distinguishers) up to 57 rounds. All these attacks are ...

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Here is a blog where Scott Aaronson wrote about this, including a link to the NSA document. That link is however now broken, but the blog contains all of the needed text. An alternative copy of the document is provided here or on the internet archive.

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Uniformity is a tricky one. SHA-256 (as well as SHA-3 for that matter) follows a heuristic approach. That is, the design is not based on a hardness assumption (for example, the factoring or discrete-log assumption) but on criteria that have only been verified empirically. As such, also the study of uniformity is an empirical study. The development of SHA-1/...

10

The idea of "safe curve" is somewhat overrated. What you really want is a safe implementation which won't leak secret information when employed in some practical context. Leakage may occur in a variety of ways; some examples include timing attacks and implementation behaviour when encountering anomalous input. This is not an exhaustive list, and, depending ...

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