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38

Can this be considered as Encryption If the sequence of necessary moves is treated as the key, yes. how secure can this encryption scheme be? First some details about the cube: 6 faces, each with 9 pieces visible each. Because the faces share some pieces, and the immovable cube center is not visible, there are only 26 pieces in total: 6 centers (...

34

Applied Cryptography is book which is becoming, say, not-so-recent. NSA has quite a lot of budget, but not an infinite amount, and there are other organization, in particular big private corporation, which also have impressive means. Google or Apple, for instance, are companies with R&D activity in the area of cryptography, and who are able to ...

33

Well, the standard answer is to preserve compatibility with DES; a hardware circuit that implemented 3DES (with EDE) could also be used to do DES as well (by, say, making all three subkeys the same). Now, there is one slight problem with this straightforward argument; 3DES (EEE, that is, with three encrypt operations) would have this property as well; if we ...

33

No, AES-NI provides a hardware implementation of AES. Before AES-NI, anyone could have purchased a specialized hardware encryption device that ran AES in hardware. So having AES-NI doesn't really change anything. When key sizes are chosen, they must take into account that specialized hardware could be developed. So, the key sizes we use already take this ...

31

There are three efficiency issues to discuss here: CPU, network bandwidth, and functionalities. The "moral" reason of public key encryption being slower than private key encryption is that it must realize a qualitatively harder feature: to be able to publish the encryption key without revealing the decryption key. This requires heavier mathematics, compared ...

31

A block cipher is a family of permutations where the key selects a particular permutation from that family. With a tweakable bockcipher both key and tweak are used to select a permuation. So tweak and key are pretty similar. The main difference are the security and performance requirements for a tweak: Changing a key can be expensive, changing a tweak must ...

27

There are two main reasons why asymmetric cryptography is practically never used to directly encrypt significant amount of data: 1) Size of cryptogram: symmetric encryption does not increase the size of the cryptogram (asymptotically), but asymmetric encryption does. If we take the example of RSAES-OAEP in PKCS#1v2 with a 1024-bit key and 160-bit SHA-1 hash,...

27

Lets see if I can clarify things for you. For one, the IV is not specifically related to AES at all. AES is a keyed invertible transform from a 128 bit value to a 128 bit value; that's all it can do. Now, if you just happen to have a 128 bit value that you want 'encrypted' into a 128 bit ciphertext, well, you can just use AES as is. However, we typically ...

25

(Disclosure: I'm the author of the functionality that you're asking about (good question!).) Ubuntu's Encrypted Home Directory feature uses eCryptfs as the filesystem encryption technology. eCryptfs is a layered filesystem built directly into the Linux kernel. It mounts one directory on top of another. The top directory is really just a "virtual" ...

24

It's a good question. As pg1989 said, this is the basis behind stream ciphers, which are very fast in practice. I thought I'd quickly expand upon your statement that "the one-time pad is the perfect cipher and impossible to crack." This is true, in a sense, but it's worth pointing out that sometimes an attacker wants to do something simpler than "cracking" ...

23

Why is it a good practice to use only the first 16 bytes of a hash for encryption? As you noted, it isn't. But, the problem is not with the "16 bytes" part of the statement, or the concern for collisions. The problem is with the "hash" part. 16 bytes As stated in one of the links you shared, AES only uses key sizes of 128, 192, and 256 bits (or 16, 24, ...

21

Symmetric encryption and asymmetric encryption algorithms are built upon vastly different mathematical constructs. In typical symmetric encryption algorithms, the key is quite literally just a random number in $\left[0 .. 2^n\right]$, where $n$ is the key length. The strength of the key is based upon its resistance to brute-force attacks, where an attacker ...

21

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The number of possible permutations of a block cipher are $2^n!$ where $n$ is the block size. A permutation maps all $2^n$ possible input blocks to $2^n$ possible output blocks. A key, with key space $2^k$ selects one of them. Although that's a huge number of keys, it is dwarfed by the amount of possible permutations. Now it's not by definition impossible ...

19

Most hashes are built from permutations (either keyed permutations/block-ciphers, as in MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-2, or unkeyed permutations as in Keccak/SHA-3 and CubeHash). A permutation is a shuffling of the inputs. Once you have a good random permutation, you can easily build a hash from it. See Construction of One-way compression functions from block ciphers ...

19

You might gain some perspective from reading up on specialized AES search hardware, like these two systems: COPACOBANA Its successor RIVYERA If you go to the second link and expand the "Cryptanalysis Performance" section, they give a performance comparison between their custom AES machine and other platforms. But the short version is that their custom ...

18

TL;DR No, the approach is not secure. Use a standard like CMAC instead. Or even better, check your AES accelerator module to see if it supports any AEAD modes of encryption like GCM, CCM, EAX. Long Version In order for a message authentication code (MAC) to be secure, an adversary with oracle access to the MAC (basically this means the adversary can send ...

17

The Diffie-Hellman key exchange is a public-key technology. It is (by itself) not an encryption algorithm (or signature algorithm), though. Here is the basic function: (All calculations here happen in a discrete group of sufficient size, where the Diffie-Hellman problem is considered hard, usually the multiplicative group modulo a big prime (for classical ...

17

The "s2k" options correspond to the String-to-Key specifiers. An s2k transform turns a human-compatible symmetric secret (a password or passphrase) into a symmetric key suitable for a symmetric encryption or MAC algorithm. Turning passwords into keys is tricky business because passwords that human can remember and accept to type tend to be weak with regards ...

17

The reasoning is wrong, because the scaling of attacks on AES is qualitatively different from the scaling of attacks on X25519. A successful multi-target attack on a system using AES-128—that is, an attack that recovers one of many keys—can cost much less than $2^{128}$ evaluations of AES-128. Specifically, using Oechslin's rainbow tables, and on a machine ...

16

Padding None can be used with stream ciphers and AES-CTR in order to keep the ciphertext the same length as the plaintext. Padding zeros cannot always be reliably removed, and so should be avoided. Any of the others can be reliably removed and are fine for use. Padding None leaks information about the length of the plaintext. Apart from that there is no ...

16

Say you encrypt a message with a key $k$. With symmetric encryption (ie. symmetric ciphers), $k$ must be secret. The sender and recipient must agree (somehow) on $k$. No-one else can be allowed to find out $k$. Anyone else who finds out $k$, can decrypt all the messages encrypted with $k$. For that reason, symmetric ciphers are often called "secret key" ...

16

In complete honesty: if you have to ask this question, it's overwhelmingly unlikely that you have actually succeeded in breaking the security of AES. At best, you may have discovered a well-known attack against misuse of particular block cipher modes; for instance, plaintext recovery with a chosen-ciphertext attack against ECB, or blind manipulation of the ...

16

As typically implemented, PBE takes a low-entropy, user-supplied password, adds some entropy to it, and thus strengthens it before turning it into a key. This key can then be used for symmetric encryption. The problem is that the user's password often has so little entropy to start with. If an attacker learns the salt, digest method and quantity of ...

15

CAST5 seems to be a solid 64-bit block cipher with 128-bit key. As far as I can tell after a short literature search, it's definition is sound and unbroken, despite nearly two decades of exposure (more for the round function). CAST5 is also known as CAST-128, defined in RFC 2144 (1997), and endorsed by ISO/IEC 18033-3:2010 (current). It is a 16-round ...

14

Blocks ciphers work by applying operations to an $n$-bit block so as to achieve confusion and diffusion. In short, a good block cipher should "mix" the bits of the plaintext and key as thoroughly as possible, so that it becomes practically impossible to recover the key or decipher unknown ciphertext. Now, to achieve confusion and diffusion, there are a few ...

14

Yes, this is a fine approach. This sort of technique is known as "key separation". Since your master key is a cryptographically secure key, you do not need to use a large iteration count. Also, you could use any PRF, in place of PBKDF2. (The iteration count is normally used if you are applying PBKDF2 to a passphrase, instead of a cryptographically secure ...

14

Decrypt the ciphertext with every possible key and store the result: $2^{56}$ decryptions. Now encrypt the (known) plaintext of the ciphertext with every possible key: $2^{56}$ encryptions. Now you have to check every entry, which is in both lists and try it with another plaintext-ciphertext pair. If you can successfully decrypt that, you are very likely to ...

14

Apparently there's at least one real-life example of a block cipher with equivalent keys: TEA has a few weaknesses. Most notably, it suffers from equivalent keys—each key is equivalent to three others, which means that the effective key size is only 126 bits. As a result, TEA is especially bad as a cryptographic hash function. This weakness led to ...

14

I understand that all zeros or all ones would be weak for any cipher. This isn't actually true. For good cipher there are no weak keys. And certain ciphers, e.g. DES, have a list of weak keys. But I assume that there would many 'patterns' that would be detected (if that is the correct term) as weak. For example, 0x0505 ...05, 0x1010...01 and 0x0A0A...0A. ...

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