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Discussion on: Cryptography for programmers 2: Blocks and Randomness

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shierve profile image
Sergi Canal

Hi Junxiao, thanks for the reply. I wanted to give general rules for all iv generation to not go into too much detail, and I felt generating random ivs is ok in most cases.

About CBC, I don't agree that ivs don't have to be unique. It is not as important that they are unique than with stream modes, but reusing ivs in CBC can leak information about the first block / repeated prepends in messages. For CBC the very small probability of a PRNG collision is acceptable, but that does not mean that it would be ok to use a static iv, or to reuse the same iv intentionally.

I can see why that probability is not so acceptable in stream modes. Still we should be aware that there is a very very small chance of that happening. I find your solution to guaranteeing uniqueness very interesting, thanks. I will take this into account when I explain GCM.