Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Applied crypto puzzle

or why it is easy to get crypto wrong

Quoting from this website (in case it would be removed):

A norbt is a web page with encrypted text. The key to encrypt and decrypt the text is the answer. When you create a norbt you decide the text, title, question and answer(key) for your norbt. 
 [...]

security

A norbt uses standard cryptography to protect your data. All the cryptography is performed locally on the user's machine. The text always travels encrypted. If somebody at norbt.com wants to view your text, they have to know the answer just like everybody else.
[...]
Real security doesn’t thrive on keeping how it works a secret. Here we explain what a hacker would have to do to crack a norbt.
Cracking a norbt means finding out the text without knowing the answer.

Cryptography used on a norbt

Let’s assume that the hacker gets access to the server and obtains the data stored there.
The data stored on the server for a norbt is:
answer: SHA1(answer + salt1) , salt1
text: AES128(SHA1(answer + salt2), IV, Mode.CFB, text), salt2, IV

For the hacker to crack the text she will have to break either SHA1(answer + salt1) or AES128 directly.
Listening to traffic won’t work to break a norbt because all encryption and decryption operations are performed in the browser. If the hacker breaks SSL to look at the traffic she won’t get any more data than what is stored on the server.

No attack with the web page data

When a browser requests to view or manage a norbt, it gets: mod(SHA1(answer + salt1),64), salt1. So the browser gets a number between 0..63 and a salt. A brute force attack with this data is not possible. A hacker that tries to perform a brute force attack will have to check with the server on 1 of every 64 attempts.

Strong Answer = Strong norbt

In most cases the answer will be the weakest point of a norbt. If an answer is easy to guess or if there are a limited number of options (example: which country do I live in?) then it is easier to try all possible options and come up with a correct answer. If your answer is strong then your norbt will be almost unbreakable.
Your norbt is as secure as your answer. To crack a norbt without guessing the answer, the hacker has to break either SHA or AES, which are cryptography standards that the security world uses (banks, governments, secure USB keys, military, computer passwords…).
We take the security of your data seriously.

Great material for a real world security puzzle!
Assuming high security requirements, how many vulnerabilities can you spot?

I'll post a solution soon.



Hint: (select text to reveal)
More precisely, you can assume the website's goal is to provide confidentiality and integrity of the information posted by the user, against web server compromise, against an active or passive MITM (who would have broken SSL), and against offline bruteforce attempts. Assume  '+' stands for concatenation, assume the servers first sends the "0..63 hash" to the javascript, if it matches, the client receives the encrypted block of text.
Note: I didn't read their javascript, they might be actually doing something else, but that's what I infered from the description they've written. It doesn't matter anyway - it is a puzzle.

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