# Tag Info

135

A key, in the context of symmetric cryptography, is something you keep secret. Anyone who knows your key (or can guess it) can decrypt any data you've encrypted with it (or forge any authentication codes you've calculated with it, etc.). (There's also "asymmetric" or public key cryptography, where the key effectively has two parts: the private key, which ...

62

Actually, that wikipedia article you mention in your question already answers your question: It is moderately common for companies and sometimes even standards bodies as in the case of the CSS encryption on DVDs – to keep the inner workings of a system secret. Some argue this "security by obscurity" makes the product safer and less vulnerable to attack. ...

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The digest is the output of the hash function. For example, sha256 has a digest of 256 bits, i.e. its digest has a length of 32 bytes. That's it really.

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I try to provide a brief intro. ABE Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is a relatively recent approach that reconsiders the concept of public-key cryptography. In traditional public-key cryptography, a message is encrypted for a specific receiver using the receiver’s public-key. Identity-based cryptography and in particular identity-based encryption (IBE) ...

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Encryption algorithms and hash algorithms both belong to the realm of cryptography but are two different things: Encryption doesn't contain hash functions. As stated on Wikipedia: In cryptography, encryption is the process of encoding a message or information in such a way that only authorized parties can access it and those who are not authorized cannot....

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I assume you are familiar with $P$ and $NP$. Also, my knowledge of SNARKs is based mostly on the work of Parno et al., other work may differ in some fine details. So, a SNARK is a succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge. Leaving the "knowledge" part aside for the moment, let's look at "plain" succinct non-interactive arguments (called SNARGs in the ...

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The ideal encryption scheme $E$ would be one that, for every ciphertext $C=E(K, M)$, if the key remains secret for the adversary, the probability of identifying $M$ is negligible. Since that is not possible in practice, the second most reasonable approach is to define constraints strong enough to satisfy some definition of security. The $\operatorname{IND-}$ ...

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Are checksums basically toned-down versions of cryptographic hashes? As in: they are supposed to detect errors that occur naturally/randomly as opposed to being designed to prevent a knowledgeable attacker's meticulous engineering feat? That is one way to look at it. However, hash functions have many purposes. They are also meant to be one-way (an attacker ...

37

"PRNG" means "Pseudorandom Number Generator" which means that a sequence of numbers (bits, bytes...) is produced from an algorithm which looks random, but is in fact deterministic (the sequence is generated from some unknown internal state), hence pseudorandom. Such pseudorandomness can be cryptographically secure, or not. It is cryptographically secure if ...

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Definition In the Damgard-Merkle construction for hash functions the compression function takes as input: a message block and a chaining value. For the very first block there is not previous "chaining value". Instead a particular value, called an initialisation vector (IV) is given. A freestart collision is a collision where the attacker can choose the ...

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Today, indeed the the terms "Cryptography" and "Cryptology" can mostly be used interchangeably. Historically things have been more interesting though, where Cryptology was the umbrella term for Cryptanalysis and (constructive) Cryptography. For example the Handbook of Applied Cryptography (chapter 1 PDF) has the following definition (page 15) of "...

27

However you pronounce them, the important thing is to make sure that your listeners understand you. In general, it's never wrong to pronounce acronyms letter by letter (and digit by digit), as in: RSA → "arr ess ay" AES → "ay ee ess" SHA-1 → "ess aitch ay one" SHA-256 → "ess aitch ay two five six" (or "ess aitch ay two fifty six" or ...

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I feel that as it was my comment, I am obliged to answer this :-). First of all, birational equivalence is really a geometric notion. As far as I know, there is no analogue for groups, rings or fields and therefore the cryptographic relevance is limited. It becomes relevant when speaking of geometric objects: for example, elliptic curves. Given these ...

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A True Random Number Generator uses a physical phenomenon not known to be fully deterministic as origin of the discrete values (bits or integer numbers) that it outputs. That phenomenon can for example be a dice throw, thermal noise, disintegration of a radioactive substance… What detects this phenomenon can be followed by a conditioning stage to turn the ...

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Simplified SSLv3/TLS from this book Note, $R_{(Alice|Bob)}$ is a random nonce chosen by Alice or Bob respectively, and $\{S\}_{Bob}$ is encryption with Bob's public key. pre-master secret As stated in one of the answer you link to, "The point of a premaster secret is to provide greater consistency between TLS cipher suites." In the figure above, the ...

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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 ...

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The word discrete is used as an antonym of 'continuous', that is, it is the normal logarithmic problem, just over a discrete group. The standard logarithmic problem is over the infinite group $\mathbb{R}^*$, this group is called 'continuous', because for any element $x$, there are other elements that are arbitrarily close to it. The discrete logarithmic ...

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The three terms (key, IV, nonce) you mentioned, and another, the salt, basically describe random numbers and each term is used in another context. The key is used as input for a cryptographic primitive and should be kept secret. A nonce is a random number only used once and for a short time with the intention to get replaced by or converted into something ...

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A trapdoor function is a function that is easy to perform one way, but has a secret that is required to perform the inverse calculation efficiently. That is, if $f$ is a trapdoor function, then $y = f(x)$ is easy to compute, but $x = f^{-1}(y)$ is hard to compute without some special knowledge $k$. Given $k$, then it is easy to compute $y = f^{-1}(x, k)$. ...

21

The correct answer would be: 1 . “Cryptography is under the security field”. Let me try to explain it a bit… Cryptography Modern cryptography concerns itself with 4 objectives: Confidentiality: the information cannot be understood by anyone for whom it was unintended. Integrity: the information cannot be altered in storage or transit between sender ...

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OK, there seems to be some confusion with regards to terminology, so let's try to clean that up. I'll try and define things myself, but also provide the more formal Wikipedia definitions. Encryption. Encryption usually is the process of concealing information solely based on the secrecy of some smaller value, which is called "a key" most of the time. Modern ...

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Perfect Secrecy (or information-theoretic secure) means that the ciphertext conveys no information about the content of the plaintext. In effect this means that, no matter how much ciphertext you have, it does not convey anything about what the plaintext and key were. It can be proved that any such scheme must use at least as much key material as there is ...

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Encryption implies that with the appropriate key, it is possible to decrypt and recover the original message. Which (in general) is not possible from a hash. Thus “I will encrypt” is not adequate if one is going to hash. While it is possible to construct hashes from encryption primitives (such as block ciphers), and vice versa, they are different beasts.

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(Notation. Sets are represented using the calligraphic font and algorithms using the straight font. Throughout, $\Sigma:=(\mathsf{K},\mathsf{S},\mathsf{V})$ denotes a signature scheme on a key-space $\mathcal{K}$, message-space $\mathcal{M}$ and signature-space $\mathcal{S}$. Since only a single key-pair is involved in the discussion, to avoid cluttering, ...

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Boolean circuits and arithmetic circuits are two different ways of representing a computation. The main difference is with respect to their input types and their gate types: boolean circuits work on bit inputs, and the gates of the circuit correspond to boolean operations (such as XOR, AND). On the other hand, arithmetic circuits work on inputs that are ...

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what Pedersen commitments are In a commitment scheme such as Pedersen the committer (or sender) decides (or is given) a secret message $m$ taken in some public message space with at least two elements; decides a random secret $r$; produces from that $m$ and $r$ a commitment $c=\mathcal C(m,r)$ by applying some public method (the commitment algorithm $\... 18 The key size is simply the amount of bits in the key. With AES, like most modern block ciphers, the key size directly relates to the strength of the key / algorithm. The higher the stronger. Since all bits are used, there are$2^{\mathit{klen}}$possible keys, taking$2^{\mathit{klen}}/2$operations to brute force on average. For AES the internal key ... 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 ... 16 As noted in this answer and this answer to another question, permutation is just a mathematical term for a function$\sigma:X{\rightarrow}X$that maps a finite set$X$onto itself, in such way that for each$y \in X$there exists exactly one$x \in X$such that$\sigma(x) = y\$. This is also equivalent to how the term substitution is used in cryptography, so ...

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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 ...

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