I'm currently reading the chapter of Cryptographic Engineering (Ferguson, Schneier, Kohno 2010) about block cipher modes of operation. They have recommended CBC with random IV instead of CTR due to the difficulty of generating nonces for CTR: In the first edition of this book, we recommended ...

For optimum security, a random IVsalt should be chosen for PBKDF2. I came across a scenario where I produce a hash of a random file that serves as the "password". Due to the nature of files, this has similar entropy issues as a "normal" password. What would happen now if I decided to take th...

I have a few questions relating to threshold signatures: a scheme where $n$ participants hold a key share and any $t$ of them can conduct a protocol using their shares that results in a valid RSA or DSA signature being applied to a known message. Questions Several techniques exist for threshol...