# Tag Info

120

The main difficulty with the one-time pad is that it requires pre-arrangement. In order for me to use a one-time pad to communicate with you, we must either have arranged ahead of time for a one-time pad that we will use (which must be as large as our communication will be), or else we must have some secure way of communicating that will allow us to agree on ...

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For symmetric encryption algorithms, your question is basically "Why do we use AES or DES rather than another function that provides the same properties as AES or DES but forces us to use the second weakest chaining mode and never lets us use the same key twice?" Well, the answer is obvious, we sometimes want strong chaining modes and we often like to use ...

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There is a theorem in cryptography that states that secure encryption and secure PRNG are equivalent, and in fact you just proved half of it. Given a secure PRNG, you can create a secure encryption algorithm using the method you just provided (using the key as the PRNG-seed). The other half is that given a secure encryption algorithm, you can create a ...

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A block cipher is a deterministic and computable function of $k$-bit keys and $n$-bit (plaintext) blocks to $n$-bit (ciphertext) blocks. (More generally, the blocks don't have to be bit-sized, $n$-character-blocks would fit here, too). This means, when you encrypt the same plaintext block with the same key, you'll get the same result. (We normally also want ...

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"Hint: XOR the ciphertexts together, and consider what happens when a space is XORed with a character in [a-zA-Z]." Let's assume that the plaintexts consist only of spaces and ASCII letters. Given the hint, that seems like a reasonable assumption to start with, even if it might turn out to be only mostly correct. Now, take one of the ciphertexts and XOR ...

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It's important to make the distinction between ciphers which use XOR internally as a component operation (which is nearly all of them), and 'ciphers' which just XOR the plaintext with a secret. If the key is the same length as the plaintext, then it's a one time pad, so in some sense, yes, with "sufficient randomness" you can safely encrypt with XOR. The ...

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Mathematically, a block cipher is just a keyed pseudorandom permutation family on the set $\{0,1\}^n$ of $n$-bit blocks. (In practice, we usually also require an efficient way to compute the inverse permutation.) A block cipher on its own is not very useful for practical cryptography, at least unless you just happen to need to encrypt small messages that ...

17

There is a very easy reason why one-time pads are not always used. It requires information sent before the encryption is set up, i.e. both the sender and the recipient need to have access to the pads themselves. That's a big pain, especially if all information was to be sent with one time pads. How would one distribute the pads themselves? There is also a ...

17

With the corrected system (which actually uses the key), I see these weaknesses: If the attacker can guess some plaintext_n, he can derive pad_n from ciphertext_n and from this all the following pad_i - which means that he can read the rest of the message. The ciphertext starts with a H(plaintext), which means that an attacker which can guess the plaintext ...

17

Very short answer: No Quite Short answer: No, because a scheme can only be a One-Time-Pad if the entire pad is perfectly random and secret. Concise answer: It sounds like you're trying to build a stream cipher. The security of it really comes down to how much of the scheme you think can be kept secret. If I listen in to your wifi and hear you requesting a ...

16

There is no universally accepted definition of the expression "stream cipher"; but the one I most often encounter is the following: a stream cipher is a symmetric encryption algorithm which accepts as inputs arbitrary sequences of bits (or bytes) such that: the length of the output is equal to the length of the input (no padding); for any $n$ (possibly any $... 15 This approach, at a high level, is actually fairly common; many stream ciphers operate on this very principle. For instance, Salsa20 uses what is effectively a hash function (a PRF) to convert a secret input (that includes a counter) into the keystream which is XORed with the plaintext. However, this kind of function can be much faster than a secure ... 15 On software platforms, bytewise adding will not be faster than bitwise XORing. It may be a bit slower, though, also this will be negligible with regards to the process which generated the stream (and, for that matter, will probably also be negligible with regards to the memory bandwidth). On hardware platforms (FPGA, dedicated ASIC), addition is slower than ... 15 By the modern definition of a cipher, it must be possible to encipher several messages with the same secret key. That's also a practical necessity, due to the difficulty of securely establishing a shared secret key. That issue is solved with the nonce, which is not secret, and can be transferred as part of the ciphertext (typically: at the beginning). ... 14 Modern encryption is not unnecessarily complicated -- it is necessarily complicated. Believe me, a lot of effort is put into making cryptographic algorithms and protocols as simple as possible. But "as simple as possible" is not the same as "simple". 14 The problem with this approach is that it literally gains you nothing. In order to choose a random subsequence of a needed length from$\pi$, you need to generate a cryptographically random number of at least the same length of the desired key to use as the offset. But then you may as well just use that number as your secret key. Other than that, yes, it's ... 14 XSalsa20 uses the same cryptographic core as Salsa20 and comes with a security proof that it's secure if Salsa20 is secure. It doesn't use the core of ChaCha and thus has worse diffusion. The way XSalsa20 works is that it hashes its 256 bit key and the first 128 bits of the nonce using HSalsa down to a 256 bit key and then uses that key together with the ... 13 The internal state of RC4 consists of a shuffled 256-element array and two pointers into that array. Thus, there are a total of $$256! \times 256^2 \approx 2^{1700.00}$$ possible states. Since the state update function of RC4 is reversible, it acts as a permutation on this set of possible states, so that every starting state will eventually recur after ... 13 AES-CTR is a stream cipher, of a particular kind where the keystream is obtained by encryption of a counter. So the question reduces to: what are drawbacks of AES-CTR compared to other stream ciphers? The main ones compared to ChaCha20 are: Without hardware support, AES can fail to cache-timing attacks. Without hardware support, AES is slower. Without ... 12 A stream cipher, RSA, or whatever you designate by the expression "discrete logarithm system", are not "one-way functions". In particular, asymmetric encryption algorithms and digital signature algorithms provide functionality which is not doable (or not with the same usability) with only the "scrambling" techniques of symmetric cryptography. Let's not ... 12 A block cipher by itself does map n bits to n bits using a key. i.e. it's a keyed pseudo-random permutation. It cannot accept longer or shorter texts. To actually encrypt a message you always need a chaining mode. ECB is one such chaining mode(and a really bad one), and it's not the pure block cipher. Even ECB consists of "add-on processing operations". ... 12 Salsa20 has strong rotational symmetry. The main point of these constant is that they're not invariant under rotations, introducing an asymmetry. The precise value isn't very important, as long as it's sufficiently asymmetric. Bernstein - Salsa20 security says: Notes on the diagonal constants Each Salsa20 column round affects each column in the same ... 12 Yes, this would be secure. CTR (Counter) mode based on keyed function$F_K$is secure as long as its output $$W_i = F_K(i)$$ is unpredictable given previous outputs $$F_K(1),F_K(2),\ldots,F_K(i-1).$$ This requirement is essentially the definition of a pseudo-random function (PRF). Most HMAC instantiations with widely used hash functions are believed to ... 12 Synchronous stream cipher, or just stream cipher. In a synchronous stream cipher a stream of pseudo-random digits is generated independently of the plaintext and ciphertext messages, and then combined with the plaintext (to encrypt) or the ciphertext (to decrypt). In the most common form, binary digits are used (bits), and the keystream is combined with ... 11 If the key used to XOR your plaintext is any shorter than your plaintext, then the repeats will give it away. If the key is truely random, and never reused, it is effectively a one-time-pad. The historical name for XOR encryption is Vernam cipher. is there something inherently wrong with XOR based ciphers The amount of effort you need to put into ... 11 By definition of Salsa20 used as a stream cipher, it uses a 64-bit block counter and 64-bytes blocks, limiting its capacity to$2^{73}\$ bits. After that, the counter would rollover, and thus the output. In a sense, this is the period. RC4 has no such explicit limit on the size of its output. We do not know how to exactly compute the period size, which very ...

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If there was no non-linearity, then every bit of keystream output would be a (known) linear function of the unknown key bits. Consequently, in a known-plaintext attack scenario, each bit of known keystream output would allow us to write a linear equation on the unknown key bits. If we have a 128-bit key, there are 128 boolean unknowns (variables), so once ...

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The Berlekamp-Massey algorithm is an iterative method for finding the shortest LFSR that can generate a given sequence of bits. The given sequence might or might not be generated by an LFSR: the Berlekamp-Massey algorithm does not care. It just finds the shortest LFSR that can generate the given sequence, and if the sequence has been generated by an LFSR of ...

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...wouldn't key still get repeated every few hours or so - i.e. you come to the end of the PRG(K)... This is where you are mistaken. Modern cryptographic PRGs simply do no repeat within any conceivable time frame. That is, starting from a seed, a well-constructed PRG (and this is true even when they are not so well constructed, like RC4) will simply never "...

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A few people have already talked about some of the problems. Let me add one that I haven't seen mentioned: despite being unbreakable in the conventional sense, a one-time pad is not entirely immune to all attacks (even when used perfectly). Consider an election system using a one-time pad. It's being used for a primary election. I'm a member of another ...

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