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Keyfiles in password encryption

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Some programs use keyfiles as a second factor besides the password. VeraCrypt and its predecessor TrueCrypt, for example, use a function built from CRC-32 that captures the first 1024 bits of a file. Both the processing of keyfiles and the length of generated files (KeePass 32 bytes, DiskCryptor and Kryptor 64 bytes) is very different. It looks like generated keyfiles are often twice as long as the targeted bit security.

To my knowledge there is no standard for this, but is there any systematic research on this?

Does it make more sense to process the keyfile before or after the key derivation function?

Which way of processing is best (HMAC, HKDF, simple hashing)?

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