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While CFB can be considered a self-synchronizing stream cipher, OFB is a typical synchronous stream cipher. Being stream ciphers, these modes suffer from the usual bit-flipping attacks and nonce-reuse problems, same as CTR.

One problem specific to these feedback modes (and also to sponge functions) is the possibility of falling into a short cycle. A random permutation is expected to have log n cycles, with one big cycle taking around half of the values and a few shorter ones. Falling into a short cycle would imply quickly repeating the stream, which is catastrophic. The good news is that for a good block cipher the probability of this happening is overwhelmingly small, i.e., 1/2^(n-1) for block size n.




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