Cryptography

Are online password managers safe to use?
> they all claim to use AES 256 bit for encryption You can use that yourself without having to supply all of your passwords to an untrusted 3rd party ... 20 Apr 2010 14:30

Asymmetric key length recommendations
http://www.keylength.com/en/4/ I noticed that the NIST recommends an asymmetric key length strength of 15360 bits for the timeframe after 2030 (the exact timeframe isn't made clear but my guess is 2100). Now, given that it recently took 4 years of nonstop computation to crack a *single* 768 bits RSA key and... 20 Apr 2010 16:17

Australian Crypto Regulations
I am from Australia and I believe there are regulations in place covering cryptology but they are hard to find. I have only found extracts on non Government sites. It seems like I am free to use cryptology and share amongst Australians but you have to get an export licence for anything else? What would happen if... 23 Apr 2010 17:55

why does PKCS#1 use the LCM instead of Euler's totient function?
Is there any particular reason PKCS#1 sets d to the e modular inverse lcm(p-1, q-1) as opposed to e modular inverse (p-1) * (q-1)? The RFC describing PKCS#1 doesn't really elaborate. ... 15 Apr 2010 13:38

Practical applications still using DES
Hi, I was wondering: all experts seem to agree that, although not endorsed as a standard any more, DES will stay around for several years before disappearing (for legacy reasons, backward compatibility, slow replacement procedures...). So, are you aware of applications or products that would: - still be in... 16 Apr 2010 15:06

HTTP and HTTPS sessions question
Some secure sites have HTTPS session stay secure from login till end of communication with site(log off). Some sites are HTTPS only when log in, after login, they become HTTP, and become HTTPS only when log off. (Yahoo mail for example, etc) What are the chances that session can be intercepted and sidejacked and... 15 Apr 2010 23:40

Associative hash function
Is there any cryptographic associative hash function? I'd like to have a collision-resistant function, where the input would be a sequence of fixed-size blocks (of a couple of KB), which would allow to compute the hash of all subsequences (a[k], a[k+1], ..., a[k+n]) efficiently. It should work by first computing th... 17 May 2010 04:48

If we could factor large numbers quickly, how exactly does everything break?
Joseph Ashwood <ashwood(a)msn.com> writes: On Apr 9, 11:10 am, Pubkeybreaker <pubkeybrea...(a)aol.com> wrote: On Apr 5, 3:10 pm, "Joseph Ashwood" <ashw...(a)msn.com> wrote: "Pubkeybreaker" <pubkeybrea...(a)aol.com> wrote in message You can continue with your statements, your inability to extrapolate, you... 11 Apr 2010 07:57

Permutations and calculated strength in bits
Permutations can get a bad reputation as keys with algorithms that rely on little else than simple substitution. They may be simply recovered even without a crib or because of a stylized sequence that has some words in the permutation. Nevertheless, on a random draw basis, they do have relative strengths. Consi... 23 Apr 2010 21:23

A link on North Korean home-grwon OS
It's interesting to see how politics could influence software production: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8604912.stm BTW, I read there: The US government has banned the uploading and downloading of open source code to residents of a handful of countries on its sanctions list, which includes North Kor... 10 Apr 2010 05:52