New answers tagged encryption
1
This could be encrypted with any key length that is equal or longer than 28 characters (sum of lengths of ciphertext you provided) and as such unsolvable. The character variation between the plaintext CANDY VERY CRANBERRYhttphttp and its ciphertext TXOtWjYhVk 8&O$4AmSAcZf.r5Hz is:
...
3
A "Key Escrow" is used in cases where a third-party needs access to encrypted data, as defined by law (so if you get a court order to decrypt data), while a "Recovery Agent" is someone who is permitted to decrypt another user's data in case of emergency and has a key that can accomplish the decryption.
So in effect, the key escrow is someone who holds the ...
0
I suspect the answer has to do with the "statelessness" of the WIFI router. Incoming and outgoing packets are treated uniformly. If some sort of encryption were negotiated on a per-connection basis, the router would have to maintain state for each communicating partner.
This would break the "layer" model; that packets are treated uniformly and higher ...
1
If you are serious about the security of your data you shouldn't be using SQL CE, but rather a full blown SQL instance running on a dedicated box. Whether it pages cleartext to disk is wholly irrelevant to the overall security posture of your application because you're running an embedded SQL server in your web server process.
To answer your question ...
3
A one-time pad is not a one-time pad if the key is stretched by an algorithm
The identifier "one-time pad" (also known as a Vernam cipher) is frequently misapplied to various cryptographic solutions in an attempt to claim unbreakable security. But by definition, a Vernam cipher is secure if and only if all three of these conditions are met:
The key ...
2
You're correct that they are not the same problem: Password authentication and symmetric encryption are fully independent concepts that can each be implemented without the other. However, a password is one of several ways to produce the key necessary to operate the encryption.
An encrypted connection such as that between your computer and your AP is ...
0
I am aware of the benefits of adding a salt to values that are hashed
using a one-way function. Is adding a salt to a value that is being
encrypted (using symmetric encryption) considered to be good practice as well?
I think your approach is flawed and will weaken the integrity of the cipher it self. By appending the salt with the plaintext that is going ...
2
A salt has absolutely no benefit for encryption. If anything, it could (though it shouldn't) make the encryption less secure. If it turns out that a known plaintext attack is found (an attack that allows information to be gained from a cypher text about the key by knowing part of the plain text) then having a public value encrypted would make every message ...
5
A salt is a cryptographically-secure random non-repeating value, added to the password before hashing it, rendering rainbow tables useless and making it impossible to attack more than one password by attacking one hash.
An initialization vector (IV) is a cryptographically-secure random non-repeating value added as the initial state to a block cipher ...
4
The other answers have already explained that Firesheep-style attacks (basically MitM trhough ARP spoofing) have nothing to do with WiFi itself. This is a link-layer issue.
As for why open WiFi networks don't have encryption. Well, they just don't. I don't really know why they decided not to, I can only speculate. One very obvious reason is MitM attacks, as ...
2
When you are talking about "no password" and "same password," I imagine you are referring to the pre-shared key. This is not actually a password, but used as a known value by the station and AP to generate and securely (at least from outside sources without the known value) exchange keying material for the encrypted traffic. WPA/WPA2-Personal do not ...
9
Firesheep has nothing to do with the WiFi encryption. If you and I were both on an encrypted WiFi connection, I would still be able to Firesheep your data.
What Firesheep does happens at the router level. It does not intercept the waves on air (well, not exactly)
Basically, it runs an ARP spoofing attack. This sort of attack can be run on a LAN network as ...
0
I have a Buffalo Linkstation Pro and with the latest firmware it comes the option that supports AFS file system that is encrypted. That will ensure communications between your PC and NAS are encrypted.
SMB should support NTLMv2 in windows for communications which is encrypted too.
The issue to manage the storage itself to be encrypted it will drive you ...
11
The question (to most people) is an oxymoron. By definition, people will think that "open WiFi" means "un-encrypted WiFi. To me you seem to be asking "Why did the people that wrote the 802.11 standard way back in 1997 make the decisions that they did?"
The short answer - we can only find out by asking them (or seeing if there are any discussion documents ...
5
Assuming you are using well-implemented, quality algorithms, having a history of the encrypted file should not significantly help an attacker.
However, I would be concerned about insecure versions of the file being kept in version control. For example, if you use a weak password at one point, that weak version could be compromised by guessing the password.
...
2
Data on hard disk has structure. That's a problem for you:
If your hidden containers don't use encryption, then inspecting the partition contents directly will show your hidden files. Such inspection is customary in forensics analysis, if only to recover parts of old files which have been deleted.
If your hidden containers use encryption, then the ...
4
There is one mcrypt which is a command-line utility and library for file encryption; and another mcrypt which is completely unrelated, and appears to be a direct rip-off of TrueCrypt, which is an implementation of an encrypted filesystem (and that rip-off might be illegal and/or malicious as well). GnuPG is an implementation of the OpenPGP standard, which ...
16
If the encryption algorithm in question is weak against a Ciphertext-only attack, having multiple variants of an encrypted files might allow an attacker to decipher the ciphertext.
All strong encryption algorithms including AES isn't susceptible to such attacks. You should be fine.
10
Homomorphic encryption is one of the two main structures for e-voting protocols, but the encryption part is not the whole protocol.
What homomorphic encryption does well is tallying. In such a system, each voter encrypts his vote (a zero or a one). Since the vote is encrypted, it can be managed rather easily: there is no problem in associating the vote with ...
3
You are right, the problem with e-voting is validation, not encryption. One can change values on the fly prior to encryption. What is important is the ability to check the votes after the fact.
Scantegrity has this all worked out, they use a one-time-pad to assign a code to each candidate that is unique to each ballot.
The codes and ballot numbers are ...
13
You are using a 128-bit key (output of MD5, hence 128 bits) with a block cipher which expects a 256-bit key (Rijndael-256). If PHP was properly implemented, it would blow in your face at that point. However, the documentation states that the key is merely padded with zeros up to the required length. If you use a 128-bit key, you'd better use a cipher with ...
5
Sorry to break it to you - you're taking really dangerous chances with those SSNs. Let's quickly define something according to PCI-DSS standards:
Q: What is defined as ‘cardholder data’?
A: Cardholder data is any personally identifiable data associated with a cardholder. This could be an account number, expiration date, name, address, social security ...
3
If you can "expose the premaster secret", though the key exchange uses ephemeral Diffie-Hellman, then you have privileged access to either the client or the server. That's one of the points of DHE: the actual key exchange uses newly generated DH key pairs, which neither client or server stores anywhere except in its own RAM. Having a copy of the permanent ...
0
Yes it does bring some security value.
This is a security measure that could be likened to CCTV, it is a detective control, and may allow you to take steps before things get to out of hand. Disable accounts / Reset users account passwords / notify users promptly incase they reused passwords.
Would he really need the password data then anyway?
Not for this ...
1
The main thing I see that makes this not work is that a smart attacker is rapidly going to figure out what it is if they get the DB dump and then know they have to get the valid hash selection from another server. It does add another level of difficulty, but I wouldn't expect a hacker to trigger this since it's pretty obvious what is going on if you have 50 ...
1
the paper says the trap-passwords should be easier to crack than the real one.
Then:
it also means that if a cracker can get trap-passwords it by no means says the real password is at any risk;
If I put a password of 'qwe123' 'complexity' , there is no need in any new method to predict that such password will be cracked soon, given the login process is ...
4
You're reading the proposal slightly wrong. This is not intended as a safeguard to detect an intrusion to already compromised system, but as means of detecting compromised system's database. This is a whole different scenario, where the attacker wouldn't already have gained access to the system by knowing any end user password, but somehow (improperly ...
0
By design, OwnCloud sits on top of a web server. You can configure SSL on the web server as you would any website or web application.
This link you provide you enough information to get you started.
5
For the most part[1] they are encrypted, but not sufficiently enough to be considered as safe, tap resistant encryption. GSM uses 64-bit A5/1 encryption that is weak, to say the least. $15 phone, 3 minutes all that’s needed to eavesdrop on GSM call article from ArsTechnica covers it pretty well IMO, if you care to read more about it.
However, it also ...
4
Yes, all GSM calls use an A5/1 stream cipher. It has been found that this is fairily easy to decrypt using a Rainbow Table. Additionally, the FBI admits to intercepting all phone conversations in the US.
So yes, it is encrypted, and cell phone companies don't give a damn about your privacy. If you care about privacy, you should use RedPhone and ...
2
You don't actually need other users for this to work, it just makes it more reasonable. You can perform chaffing by merely creating pseudorandom packets and MACs and mixing them in with yours.
The problem with chaffing and winnowing is that each message must be so small as to convey no useful information to the attacker. Otherwise, attackers can use ...
3
The encryption you use depends on the risk you're trying to mitigate. File/disk encryption is typically used to protect against theft of the physical media. i.e. they won't be able to access the content as it's encrypted. For a web application this doesn't provide any additional protection so protection of the data within the database may make more sense.
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1
Interesting question and I hope this helps a little in terms of my experience of seeing this implemented...
keyA is valid for 2 years
Data encrypted with keyA is flagged as having been encrypted by index number of keyA
For decryption operations keyA is used
After 2 years keyB is used to encrypt new data
Data encrypted with keyA is decrypted when ...
5
A jailbroken iPhone or "rooted" Android device is not qualitatively distinguishable from a desktop system. From the server side, you cannot know whether the device is rooted or not; or even if it really is the device you believe it is to be. Whatever issues Javascript-based crypto can have on "desktop" systems also apply to mobile platforms. Of course, any ...
7
Judging by the structured format, I would say this is not encryption of any kind, but encoding. A possible scheme could be as follows;
brand | year | divider | month | id | postfix
------|------|---------|-------|------|--------
J | 01 | A | 06 | 2YL | MP1
J | 01 | A | 06 | OEP | MP1
J | 08 | A | 07 | GSV | ...
1
A secured phone line would indicate that there is encryption in place. This would be similar to how we do encryption in networks using TLS, etc. The line on it's own would not typically be encrypted, but the data flowing over the line would be encrypted. Typically, there is encoding software/hardware built into the phone units or you could encrypt the data ...
5
With software, reverse engineering works (there is even a dedicated StackExchange site for reverse engineering questions). Extracting secrets from compiled binaries has been done and redone and done again since the days of the first "copy-protected" games for personal computers, back in the 1980s. The bottom-line is that you cannot really hide a secret value ...
2
You can add an API_key to your authentication process - something that a user needs to request first thing from the server. This initial request can contain device specific information, application specific information and user identity bits. Generated API_key can be a cryptographic hash function of that data.
A server stores all the API_keys and link a ...
2
"Encrypted connections" to SQL Server use SSL. That's about as good as you can get. Remember, though, that SSL protects only the connection, i.e. the data as it transits between the client and the SQL Server. It does nothing about how the data is stored on the server. It also does nothing about isolating connected clients from each other; that part is ...
2
Depends. In general, no. If the attacker launches a man-in-the-middle attack after HTTPS communication has already started, he can do nothing.
If he launches the attack beforehand, he can do various things. For convenience, let's assume that the server in question is GMail.
Pretend to be mail.google.com: This is a pretty transparent attack. The attacker ...
6
A man-in-the-middle attack is a simultaneous double impersonation: Charlie poses as Alice when he talks to Bob, as Bob when he talks to Alice. Since both conversations are simultaneous, Charlie can elect to pass chunks of data from Alice directly to Bob and vice-versa, adding his own parts selectively.
If Alice and Bob have a shared secret K, which Charlie ...
2
Public key cryptography is for when there are several distinct entites, i.e. he who decrypts is not the same person than he who encrypts; similarly, when we want people to be able to verify signatures without granting them the technical power to produce signatures of their own.
Public key cryptography is not inherently "more secure" or "less secure" than ...
0
I solved the problem by having the vendor send the public certificate as well as a digital signature along with the signed text.
The server would then verify the digital signature by using the certificate's public key.
5
"Best" implies some gradation on a scale, which should be defined...
The most commonly used asymmetric encryption algorithm is RSA. It is good enough for most purposes. RSA has some limitations, which are rather generic (i.e. which apply to most other asymmetric encryption algorithms as well):
It can process only limited-size messages (with a 1024-bit RSA ...
0
I solved the problem. I installed the WinHttpCertCfg tool and granted access to the private key. The command that worked for me is:
WinHttpCertCfg.exe -g -c LOCAL_MACHINE\MY -s "" -a EVERYONE
6
To quote from pqcrypto.org: "Imagine that it's fifteen years from now. Somebody announces that he's built a large quantum computer. RSA is dead. DSA is dead. Elliptic curves, hyperelliptic curves, class groups, whatever, dead, dead, dead." Worth a visit to their site to understand what crypto looks like after the (hypothetical) success of quantum computing.
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Short answer: Yes.
Elliptic curve cryptography is vulnerable to a modified Shor's algorithm for solving the discrete logarithm problem on elliptic curves.
5
When the machine says that "you have the private key corresponding to this certificate", then this means that you have the private key which corresponds to the certificate, not that the certificate itself contains the private key.
Asymmetric keys come in pairs: the public key and the private key. They are mathematically linked to each other, but rebuilding ...
3
openssl is a very good command line tool that I have used to create self signed certificates. This will allow you to specify the values for each and every field in the certificate and it is available for both Linux and Windows.
basically you can create a self signed certificate using openssl in just one command
openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout ...
2
At some point you will have to trust some code, somewhere. This is why audit procedures involve source code review and background checks on developers.
For the practical way to split and reassemble a secret, a reasonably strong way is to make the reassembly only on a "safe" machine, under visual scrutiny of the secret part holders. A "safe" machine can be a ...
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