Why I can't import private key to metamask? - cryptography

I'm new. Sorry for maybe the stupid question.
Please, help me to understand why I can't import this private key to metamask:
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFEBAAEDCE8AF48A04CBFD47E8CB0366361
Well, I've changed couple of symbols.
Thank you very much!

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFEBAAEDCE8AF48A04CBFD47E8CB0366361 although a valid 256-bit value, isn't a valid secp256k1 private key.
Not all 256-bit strings are a formally valid private key; The key must be a positive integer less than 𝑛, the order of the largest prime order subgroup.
i.e less than FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFE BAAEDCE6 AF48A03B BFD25E8C D0364141

Related

derive private keys that have been xored whith each other to a public key

Hello everyone
I have a pool of binary data with n elements.
k of those elements (the private keys) have been xored with each other, generating another element (a public key), which is also in the pool. All the other elements are irrelevant.
So when xoring the private keys and the public key, the result should be 0.
I don't know the position of the k private keys and the position of the public key. I have to figure those out.
What would be an approach I could try, a phrase I could search for or an existing algorithm?
What I've tried (and failed because of runtime)
Of course I tried the brute force approach.
My first attempt was the worst. I made an iterator, and checked every option until I got there.
I did the same thing like in the first attempt but with an imaginary tree.
Those worked, but the runtime was to bad, with n = 115; k = 11.
I've tried something like this but I couldn't get something in this direction work for my needs.
Please help I put way to much time in this,
Hellow2

What makes the trapdoor function in elliptic curve cryptography hard to reverse?

I've been reading this article on elliptic-curve crypto and how it works:
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/a-relatively-easy-to-understand-primer-on-elliptic-curve-cryptography/
In the article, they state:
It turns out that if you have two points [on an elliptic curve], an initial point "dotted" with itself n times to arrive at a final point [on the curve], finding out n when you only know the final point and the first point is hard.
It goes on to state that the only way to find out n (if you only have the first and final points, and you know the curve eqn), is to repeatedly dot the initial point until you finally have the matching final point.
I think I understand all this - but what confuses me is - if n is the private key, and the final point corresponds to the public key (which I think is the case), then doesn't it take the exact same amount of work to compute the public key from the private, as it does the private from the public (both just have to recursively dot a point on the curve)? am I misunderstanding something about what the article is saying?
The one-way attribute of ECC and RSA is due to the Chinese Reminder Theoreom (CRT). A series of arithmetic divisions where only the remainder is kept (aka Modulo operation %), which results in information loss in the output. As a result, the person with the keys takes one direct path to generate the output - and any would-be attacker has to exhaust a massive number of possible paths in order to determine what key was used to create the output. If the simple division was used instead of a modulo - then key data would be present in the output and it couldn't be used for cryptography.
If you lived in a world where you had a powerful enough computer to exhaust all possibilities - then the CRT wouldn't be useful as a cryptographic primitive. The computers we have now a fairly powerful - so we balance the power of our modern machines with a keysize that introduces enough range of possibilities so that they cannot be exhausted in a timeframe that matters.
The CRT is a subset of the P vs NP problem set - so perhaps proving P=NP may lead to a way of undermining the oneway aspect of asymmetric cryptography. We know that there is a way to factor CRT using a quantum computer running Shor's Algorithm. Shor's Algorithm has proven that we can defeat the so-called "trapdoor", or one-way attributes of CRT, it is still however an expensive attack to conduct.
The following lecture is my favorite description of the CRT. It shows that there are many possible solutions for one direction forcing an attacker to exhaust them all and only one solution for the other:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru7mWZJlRQg
EDIT: I previously stated that n is not the private key. In your example, n is either server or client private key.
How it works is that there is a starting point known to anybody.
You select random integer k and do the "dotting operation" k-times. Then you send this new point to the server. (k is your private key)
Server does the same with the starting point, but q-times and sends it to you. (q is server's private key)
You take the point you got from server and "dot" it k-times. The final point would be the starting point "dotted" k*q-times.
Server does the same with point it got from you. And again its final point would be the starting point "dotted" q*k-times.
That means the final point (= the starting point "dotted" k*q-times) is the shared secret since all what any attacker would know is the starting point, the starting point dotted k-times and the starting point dotted q-times. And given only those data, it's practically impossible to find the final point as a product of k*q unless any of those known.
EDIT: No, it doesn't take the same time to compute k from G = kP given known values of G (sent point) and P (starting point). More in comment section and:
For rising to power, see Exponentiation by squaring.
For ECC point multiplication, see point multiplication.

Shamir's Secret Sharing using Bignum or Bigint or ....?

I've got a generic cryptographic implementation using OpenSSL's BIGNUM library in C. Standard decryption is working fine, but i would also like to implement Shamir's secret sharing (SSS).
The problem i've run across is that BIGNUM only supports whole numbers, and as part of the Lagrange interpolation for SSS, i'll need to be multiplying by negative values.
Is there any way to do this? Otherwise: I can do my SSS in another language (python?) so long as it is able to interact with the BIGNUM's produced by OpenSSL.
Any suggestions? TIA!
As you look at BIGNUM structure in OpenSSL, you'll find a flag named neg. If the BIGNUM object represents a negative number, neg will be set to 1. Also, the bn_mul() function handles the multiplication by negative number correctly. So you can implement SSS with OpenSSL, no problem!
Modular arithmetic (using groups) only provides positive results, so I presume you want to use non-modular arithmetic? In that case you could simply keep a separate variable indicating if the value is negative or not. The outcome of positive multiplication is the same except for the sign bit anyway.
It's not as clean a design as possible, but for a few methods it would probably not matter that much. You could create separate methods that mimic the BN methods except for an integer holding the value of the sign (-1, 0 or 1).

OTP/XOR Cracking two ciphertexts that have the same key

How can I crack two ciphertexts that have used the same key twice? For example, plaintext1 uses the key "abcdefg", and plaintext2 uses the key "abcdefg".
I know that ciphertext2 ^ ciphertext1 is equal to plaintext1 ^ plaintext2. And the method to crack plaintext1 ^ plaintext2 is the same method to crack a "book cipher" (also sometimes called a "running key cipher", although a running key cipher isn't the same as a book cipher, right?)
I know that I'm supposed to use a dictionary attack, but I'm not sure which dictionary/wordlist I should use, and the algorithm used in cracking this. Can anyone provide me with a link, or some code that shows how to crack it?
I'm new to cryptography, and I just wanted to do this for fun. Can anyone help me out? Thanks.
The most common attack is to "slide" a common (but not too short) word along and XOR it against successive positions in the combined stream. Where the word was used in one stream, the XOR will (usually) produce readable text for the other stream.

How do i get the BITS length from NSUintger, NSString

I need to get the BIT length from NSUinteger or NSString
How i can get the bit length?
Thanks
If I'm understanding the question correctly (it is kind of odd, but... hey... so am I):
sizeof(NSUInteger) * 8
[aString maximumLengthOfBytesUsingEncoding: ...] * 8
For NSNumber, a subclass of NSValue, things get a little bit trickier. You'll need to call -objCType, then determine the bit length from that.
OP: I really think you need to organize your thoughts and ask a single, coherent question that, at a minimum, gives an overview of what you're trying to accomplish. So far you have asked at least four questions that are all minor variations of each other.
To other people answering this question: From the context of his other questions, he's trying to do some bignum crypto (ala RSA), or some other bignum number theory stuff (needs to do powermod()). Again, based on the context of his other questions, what he's asking in this question is how to do floor(log2(X)) + 1 where X is an arbitrary data type (hence the NSString).
I have a RSA Exponent key value which is supposed to be a biginteger but i have it in NSString/NSdata with full value in(UTF8 encoded)
As Part of RSA encryption , i need to do the following in the Iphone Env
1.I need to find the bit length of the above exponent value
2.I need to do arithmatic operations on exponent and modulus values including PowMod
3.so which data type i can use (uint64_t or NSNUmber or NSUinteger) for arithmatic operations as well as holding the bigint result value.
4.do i need to go for a specfic bigint implementation, can i able to manage with the above existing iphone data types for bigint ?
5. those external bigint implementations expect to port openssl or gmp lib to Iphone ?