Solution to TUCTF 2017 The Neverending Crypto

28/11/17 — capitol

CipherDisk

name:

The Neverending Crypto

category:

crypto

points:

50

Writeup

We where presented with a server that encrypted strings with a substitution cipher.

You where also able to give up to twenty characters that the server gave the solution for.

The server didn’t use the complete byte range and it was a hassle to find out what characters that was included in the substitution. The server leaked the plain texts from time to time, and the number of plain text strings that was encrypted was small, only nine different ones.

This meant that we could write some simple heuristics to decide which of the strings to send back, the same plain text character always encrypts to the same encrypted character, so we could look at what characters in the ecrypted text are equal to determine what plain text to send back.

Implemented like this:

import socket
import re
import string
 
sobj = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET,socket.SOCK_STREAM)
sobj.connect(("neverending.tuctf.com",12345))
sobj.recv(1024)
 
re_question = re.compile(r"is (?P<question>.*) decrypted")
re_match = re.compile(r"a encrypted is (?P<chr>.)")

def workit():
    sobj.send("a\n")
 
    hint =  sobj.recv(1024)
    print "hint", repr(hint)
    c = re_match.match(hint).groupdict()["chr"]
 
# What is :BB7RJBE>^R@BE8 decrypted?
    question = re_question.findall(hint)[0]
    print "Question is", question
    answer = ""
    if question[1] == question[10]:
        answer = "how many more??"
    if question[11] == question[13]:
        answer = "something here."
    if question[1] == question[5]:
        answer = "you got lucky.."
    if question[12] == question[13]:
        answer = "you have skills"
    if question[1] == question[2]:
        answer = "good work, more"
    if question[1] == question[9]:
        answer = "you crypto wiz!"
    if question[13] == question[14] and question[1] == question[10]:
        answer = "how many more??"
    if question[1] == question[13]:
        answer = "welcome, hacker"
    if question[1] == question[6] and question[1] == question[13] and question[3] == question[10]:
        answer = "dont forget to "
    if answer == "":
        print "I DO NOT KNOW"
        import sys
        sys.exit()
    print answer
    sobj.send(answer + "\n")

while True:
    workit()
    print sobj.recv(1024)