# Matasano Crypto Challenges Set 1

• Started writing: <2016-02-08 Mon>
• Posted: <2016-02-10 Wed>
• Estimated time to read: 10 minutes

## Introduction

Matasano security (now part of NCC Group) has circulated a set of six challenges related to implementing cryptographic protocols. They start basic and become more sophisticated, but they all revolve around exposing flaws in naive implementations of cryptographic systems. Originally they were circulated by email and you had to submit your solutions before advancing to the next set. In addition, Matasano required that write-ups not be published in order to avoid people just reading solutions and not fully grokking the implementation flaw being exposed.

Now, anything is allowed. All seven sets (the original six plus a bonus set) are published at cryptopals.com. I want to write up my impressions, and hints, but I don't want to give away the solutions. That being said, my solutions are here: github.com/cryptopals-solutions. Please don't read them until you've either solved it yourself, or exhausted all help on #cryptopals on freenode.

## Set 1

### Challenge 1 and 2

The first two challenges are warm up. The first, converting between hex and base64, are designed to get you comfortable thinking in bytes. Base64 is used a lot to encode binary information, in the challenges and on the web. Hex is used to view the "raw bytes." The only thing that bears a little elaboration is the Cryptopals Rule:

Always operate on raw bytes, never on encoded strings. Only use hex and base64 for pretty-printing.

What this means is, don't write your code to depend on the string representation of the hex values. Put another way: always operate on unsigned integers ranging from 0 to 255.

### Challenge 3

Challenge 3 is the first time we have to discover a secret given a cipher text. The single byte XOR, is another name for the Ceasar cipher. Since the key is a single byte, there are only 255 possible key values. This makes it very simple to test all possible keys. The only challenge comes in detecting which key produces the correct plain text.

There are a number of ways to approach this problem. One is to require that all characters of the decrypted text be printable. Another (and the one hinted in the challenge, and required later on) is to use frequency analysis. Since the XOR operation translates each byte of the plaintext string by the same amount, it doesn't modify the frequency distribution of the input text. This means that the correct key is the one that produces the frequency distribution that most closely matches the plaintext distribution. In this case, its english. What metric should we use to determine how close they are? Again, there are many possible, but the one I've used is a combination of requiring printable ASCII characters and Pearson's $$\chi^2$$ test. The wikipedia article describes the nitty gritty details, but the part you need to implement is:

$$\chi^2 = \sum_{i=1}^n \frac{(O_i-E_i)^2}{E_i}$$

If we view this as a histogram, $$O_i$$ is the $$i^{\text{th}}$$ bin of the histogram we observe with a given key (ie, the frequency histogram when we decrypt the ciphertext with key $$k$$). Similarly, $$E_i$$ is the $$i^{\text{th}}$$ bin of the expected English frequency histogram. These histograms should be normalized so that the sum of their bin values is 1. If you don't think in terms of histograms and bins, then look at it as $$O_i$$ is the probability that you observe the $$i^{\text{th}}$$ letter of your alphabet. In this challenge, and Challenge 6, the alphabet used is important. One that works is $$A$$ = { a-z, ' '}. It doesn't matter what alphabet you choose as long as you are consistent in your definitions for $$O_i$$ and $$E_i$$.

### Challenge 6

Challenge 4 exercises the code and concepts you developed in Challenge 3. Challenge 5 sets up the code you need for Challenge 6. Challenge 6 is the challenge that tests your ability to make multiple pieces of code work together to produce a result greater than the sum of its pieces. The challenge text does a good job of outlining the strategy and if you have consistent definitions in place from the previous challenges, then you should be good to go.

There are two parts of this challenge that can use a little elaboration. The first is determining the key given its length, the second is determining the key length.

#### Determining the key of a Vigenere cipher given its length

Lets take a concrete example from the Vigenere cipher. Let our plain text be:

Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.

Which after removing spaces and punctuation and up-casing is:

SPEAKSOFTLYANDCARRYABIGSTICKYOUWILLGOFAR


Let our key be $$k$$ = "SECRET", then our cipher text is:

KTGROLGJVCCTFHERVKQEDZKLLMEBCHMAKCPZGJCI


Now we put ourselves in the shoes of the cryptanalyst. Lets say he knows the length of the key, but not the word. If we break up the cipher text in columns with rows the same length of the key (6 in this example) we get:

SECRET
------
KTGROL
GJVCCT
FHERVK
QEDZKL
LMEBCH
MAKCPZ
GJCI


Now notice that All the letters that line up in the first column correspond to a Caesar cipher with key "S":

K G F Q L M G


Everything in the second column is a Caesar cipher with key "E":

T J H E M A J


And so on. Once we solve the Caesar cipher for each column (choosing the key that gives a frequency distribution that looks most like English), we have the set of Caesar keys that give the total Vigenere key $$k$$ = "SECRET".

#### Determining the key length

Now that we know how to figure out the key given its length, we have to figure out its length. As usual, there are a number of different approaches, but the one suggested by the challenge works well.

It requires that we calculate the Hamming distance between two strings. The first reason this works so well, is that in a binary alphabet we have just two letters (0 and 1). The Hamming distance measures the numbers of substitutions to transform one sequence to another. If you play with a few binary sequences you will find that the bits which must change in string $$A$$ and string $$B$$ is: $$C = A \oplus B$$. To compute the Hamming distance we just sum the number of 1's in the resulting binary string $$C$$.

The second reason that this works is the property that if $$A \equiv B$$, then $$A \oplus B = 0$$. Now if we look at the repeating key XOR cipher again, we have (using binary XOR instead of adding mod 26):

    535045414b534f46544c59414e44434152525941424947535449434b594f5557494c4c474f464152
(+) 53454352455453454352455453454352455453454352455453454352455453454352455453454352
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
001506130e071c03171e1c151d01001317060a04011b0207070c00191c1b06120a1e09131c030200


If we guess the key length to be three ($$L=3$$), then we would find the hamming distance between:

$$H('\text{001506}','\text{130e07}')=8$$

Symbolically we would have ($$C[x:y]$$ denotes the substring starting at $$x$$ and ending at $$y$$):

\begin{align} H(C[0:3] &,C[3:6]) =8 \\ H(P[0:3]\oplus K[0:3] &,P[3:6] \oplus K[3:6]) =8 \end{align}

If we let our plaintext for the first 6 letters be the same for the moment (say "AAAAAA"), then it becomes clear that we are finding the hamming distance between the first three letters of the key, and the second three letters of the key:

$$H(K[0:3],K[3:6])=5$$

But, $$L=3$$ was just a guess, we have to try different key lengths. Something special happens when we guess $$L=6$$ in our example (remember K="SECRETSECRETSECRET…"):

$$H(K[0:6],K[6:12])=0$$

but we don't have the key yet, all we have is the cipher text:

$$H(C[0:6],C[6:12])=15$$

Notice however, that this is just the hamming distance between the first 12 characters of our plaintext:

$$H(P[0:6],P[6:12])=15$$

It should hopefully be clear that when we find the hamming distance between parts of our cipher text using the correct key length, we are only finding the hamming distance between parts of the plain text. If we guess the wrong key length, the cancellation doesn't occur and it will result in a larger hamming distance. This leads to the procedure: guess multiple key lengths and choose the key length with the smallest hamming distance.

## Conclusion

The last two challenges in the first set get us ready for what's coming in the next set. Challenge 7 forces us to figure out how to use OpenSSL in our language of choice, and Challenge 8 introduces us to an important feature of AES in ECB (Electronic Code Book) mode. In ECB, identical 16 bytes of plaintext will encode to the same 16 byte cipher text (remember: 128 bits = 16 bytes).

As the challenges state, if you can make it through Challenge 6, then you're qualified to finish all 6 sets. The later sets will require more and more infrastructure to set up the attacks, but in general you won't have more moving pieces than Challenge 6.

If you have any comments, you can tweet me @dbjergaard.