4
votes
2answers
218 views

How less secure is an encryption if we know something about the original data?

I have a number of files encrypted with a key derived from a password. In line with standard practice, I use a random salt and password and do many PBKDF2 iterations to obtain an encryption key and ...
3
votes
2answers
190 views

LastPass One Time Recovery Passwords--How?

The LastPass password manager stores One Time Recovery Passwords locally in each browser you use the plugin with: http://helpdesk.lastpass.com/account-recovery/ My question is, how can you have more ...
3
votes
1answer
113 views

Key length and hash function in PBKDF2

On this page: http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.0/libdoc/openssl/rdoc/OpenSSL/PKCS5.html they make a statement that strikes me as rather weird: Key Length Specifies the length in bytes of ...
3
votes
4answers
188 views

Is it safe to have the salt equal to IV?

If I'm using AES-256 CBC to encrypt, getting the 32 byte key using multiple iterations of the PBKDF2 function with a 16 byte salt, is it safe for me to let IV be equal to the salt? (Edit: The salt is ...
5
votes
3answers
335 views

Verify Login and Encrypt with PBKDF2

I'm writing a desktop application where I'm using PBKDF2 to generate an encryption key to AES-128 encrypt the config file. The config file contains a crypo-random key that's been used to encrypt the ...
4
votes
3answers
2k views

What's the advantage of using PBKDF2 vs SHA256 to generate an AES encryption key from a passphrase?

I'm looking at two comprable pieces of software which need to encrypt data on disk using a passphrase. One uses PBKDF2 to generate the encryption key from a passphrase, while the other uses two rounds ...