« first day (3045 days earlier)      last day (1927 days later) » 

02:52
3
Q: Is there a bulletproof way to know a file has been successfully decrypted?

thermomagnetic condensed bosonI am wondering whether there is a bulletproof way to know if one is successful in decrypting a file. As an example, say I encrypt a text file and protect it with a 3 letter password. I use brute force to decrypt it, but two different passwords lead to a file that contains English intelligible t...

 
11 hours later…
13:28
Dang, I'm happy with my answer this time around:
3
A: Is using RSA with SHA-1 considered as secure as HMAC-SHA-1?

Maarten BodewesNo, unfortunately your well meant comparison with HMAC fails and RSA with SHA-1 is considered insecure. The construction of HMAC makes it near invulnerable to attacks on the collision resistance of the underlying hash. That is because it uses the secret key as input to the hash function to creat...

That's as simple and concise as it can reasonably be constructed I think. If anybody has any nitpicks, then please provide them.
I've provided too many fluffy answers of lately. I'm practiciing a bit on SO to get back my conciseness.
(can't screw up SO after all).
13:52
We are human SO we can screw up everywhere. Good luck with the HNQ.
14:43
OK, Squeamish had something more than nitpicks, now the question is better but less concise :)
15:00
@SqueamishOssifrage You've complained about an unexplained downvote not too long ago (in a comment). Is that a common occurrence for current answers? Note that as mods we only have limited info when it comes to voting behavior.
15:28
If this becomes a problem (again) please let us know so we can decide to escalate to the SE team.
16:04
It happens from time to time. Only pattern I've noticed is that it seems to happen on a lot of questions that Paul asked or answered too.
16:24
In this case I don't suspect anything nefarious, and on reflection I can guess why the downvoter voted—because I didn't really address the issue of false positives in a brute force search, which I've done now.
 
2 hours later…
18:18
Sara Chipps on November 13, 2019

In my very first blog post, I wrote about what a personal experience taught me about the Stack Overflow community. I said we were going to step back and re-evaluate how we deliver feedback, how we can improve content quality, and how we can reduce friction between people. I said that our goal is to have the question asking process be painless and beneficial for new people and Stack Overflow veterans alike.    

During this re-evaluation period, we noticed something in our reputation reward system. We give anyone who receives an upvote on an answer ten additional reputation points, but only give five reputation points to people who receive an upvote on a question.  …

No info about downvotes.
We did not close, migrate, or answer this question.
1
Q: What is the state of the art in fast implementation techniques for modular exponentiation?

Madhuchhanda MandalI want to calculate ($m^{e} \pmod{N}$) in C or C++. I want to use 2048 bits long modulus $N$ and thus the above process of exponentiation will use a huge amount of calculations and time. I want to know the possible optimizations I can use. I particularly came across this : Converting the expone...

 
2 hours later…
20:17
2
Q: Is using RSA with SHA-1 considered as secure as HMAC-SHA-1?

philippeI know SHA-1 hashing is regarded insecure. HMAC-SHA-1 is still regarded secure as this is an encryption process with symmetric key of the hash produced by SHA-1. So signing using RSA with a key size of 2048 with a SHA-1 hash over the content should be regarded secure just like HMAC-SHA-1, correct?

 
2 hours later…
22:01
@kelalaka downvote values are not affected

« first day (3045 days earlier)      last day (1927 days later) »