BSides’17 – Delphi

In this challenge, we are given a server which accepts encrypted commands and returns the resulting output. First we define our oracle go(cmd).

import urllib2

def go(cmd):
	return urllib2.urlopen('' + cmd).read()

This simply return the status from the server. It is common for this kind of CTF challenges to use some block-cipher variant such as some of the AES modes.

The first guess I had was that AES-CBC was being used. That would mean that if we try to flip some bit in a block somewhere in the middle of the ciphertext, the first decrypted part would remain intact, whilst the trailing blocks would get scrambled.

Assume that we have four ciphertext blocks C_0, C_1, C_2, C_3 and the decryption is \textsf{dec}_k : C_0\| C_1\| C_2\| C_3 \mapsto P_0\|P_1\|P_2\|P_3. Now, we flip a bit in C_1 so that we get C_1', then we have \textsf{dec}_k : C_0\| C'_1\| C_2\| C_3 \mapsto P_0\|P'_1\|P'_2\|P'_3. (This is not true, thanks to hellman for pointing that out in the comments).

Turns out this is not the case. In fact, the error did only propagate one block and not further, i.e.,\textsf{dec}_k : C_0\| C'_1\| C_2\| C_3 \mapsto P_0\|P'_1\|P'_2\|P_3. Having a look at the Wikipedia page, I found that this is how AES-CFB/(CBC) would behave (image from Wikipedia):



Since \textsf{dec}_k(C_0) \oplus C_1 = P_1, we can inject some data into the decrypted ciphertext! Assume that we want P'_1 = Q. Then, we can set C'_1 = C_1 \oplus P_1 \oplus Q, since then \textsf{dec}_k(C_0) \oplus C'_1 = P_1\oplus P_1 \oplus Q = Q. Embodying the above in Python, we might get something like

def xor(a, b):
    return ''.join(chr(ord(x) ^ ord(y))
              for x, y in zip(a, b))

cmd = '8d40ab447609a876f9226ba5983275d1ad1b46575784725dc65216d1739776fdf8ac97a8d0de4b7dd17ee4a33f85e71d5065a02296783e6644d44208237de9175abed53a8d4dc4b5377ffa268ea1e9af5f1eca7bb9bfd93c799184c3e0546b3ad5e900e5045b729de2301d66c3c69327'
response = ' to test multiple-block patterns' # the block we attack

split_blocks = [cmd[i * 32: i * 32 + 32]
                for i in range(len(cmd) / 32)]

block = 3 # this is somewhat arbitrary

# get command and pad it with blank space
append_cmd = '  some command'
append_cmd = append_cmd + '\x20' * (16 - len(append_cmd))

new_block = xor(split_blocks[block].decode("hex"),
new_block = xor(new_block.decode("hex"),

split_blocks[block] = new_block
cmd = ''.join(split_blocks)
#print cmd
print go(cmd)

We can verify that this works. Running the server, we get

This is a longer string th\x8a\r\xe4\xd9.\n\xde\x86\xb6\xbd*\xde\xf8X\x15I  some command  e-block patterns\n

OK, so the server accepts it. Nice. Can we exploit this? Obviously — yes. We can guess that the server does something like

echo "{input string}";

First, we break off the echo statement. Then we try to cat the flag and comment out the rest. We can do this in one block! Here is how:

append_cmd = '\"; cat f* #'

Then, the server code becomes

echo "{partial + garbage}"; cat f* #{more string}";

The server gives the following response:

This is a longer string th:\xd7\xb1\xe8\xc2Q\xd7\xe8*\x02\xe8\xe8\x9c\xa6\xf71\n

Indeed, this is the flag. So, we are done!