## Wednesday, 12 October 2016

### CODZ ciphers, testing RC4 in python

Some of the CODZ ciphers consist of binary data, and it is not clear what sort of cipher has created them. Notably 2,3,7 and 10 are base64 converted binary data. Ciphers 4,5,11, and 14 are hex data. I will be dealing with 2,3,7 and 10 in this post.

Cipher 2 decrypts to: dd3ed3b56ff21a7751ebbbaf6ffd1086f190a6b29b49c2a47e656bcc91768346df0321db23505874cb9f8a71d978490e and 3a411e6479e27ee31d601d486c7c807dbd20d85273ad599f90a7126caae9406be1434fdbbeeefa45d9c6cbf5ad4fb4f7 depending on wether you read the base64 data forwards or backwards. Either way you get exactly 384 bits of binary, which is suspiciously similar to the SHA384 hash length. I tried running john the ripper on the two hashes for a day or so, but nothing turned up. Either it is not SHA384 or we're gonna need some better word lists.

Ciphers 3,7 and 10 are longer. I have tested their entropy after breaking them up into different length segments, and the entropy is pretty much always equal to random, this means they are highly unlikely to have been generated by a classical cipher. More likely something modern like RC4. I have tried decrypting the 3 ciphers as RC4 using a wordlist for the keys, but no luck.

Code for testing entropy:

from base64 import decodestring
from bitarray import bitarray
from binascii import b2a_hex
from math import log

ctext = 'iW9cXmzOU7ZuZBtW40b3ng...' # I cut the rest of the cipher off to save space
data = decodestring(ctext)

a = bitarray(endian='little')
a.frombytes(data)

for bitlen in range(1,16):
code = {}
for i in range(2**bitlen):
string = format(i,'0'+str(bitlen)+'b')
code[i] = bitarray(string)
num = a.decode(code)
freq = {}
for i in num:
if i in freq: freq[i] += 1.
else: freq[i] = 1.
N = len(num)
en = 0
for i in freq.values():
p = i/N
en -= p*log(p)
print bitlen,' entropy: ',en,' if random: ',-log(1./2**bitlen)


For decrypting RC4, we keep the key corresponding to the decrypt with the lowest entropy, if the wrong key is used something high entropy will result, but if it decrypts to text we should get something easily identifiable. Python code for decrypting RC4 with a word list:

data = base64.b64decode(ctext)

def rc4(data,key):
S = range(256)
j = 0
out = []

#KSA Phase
for i in range(256):
j = (j + S[i] + ord( key[i % len(key)] )) & 0xFF
S[i] , S[j] = S[j] , S[i]

#PRGA Phase
i = j = 0
for char in data:
i = ( i + 1 ) & 0xFF
j = ( j + S[i] ) & 0xFF
S[i] , S[j] = S[j] , S[i]
out.append(chr(ord(char) ^ S[(S[i] + S[j]) & 0xFF]))
return out

# find a good word list and use it here
keylist = open("C:\Users\james\Desktop\cipher_stuff\simplesub_word\\count_1w.txt")

besten = 10e10
bestkey = ""
bestout = ""
for count,key in enumerate(keylist):
key = key.split()[0].strip()
for i in range(3):
if i == 0: key = key[0].upper() + key[1:].lower()
elif i == 1: key = key.upper()
else: key = key.lower()
out = rc4(data,key)
# compute entropy of the decoded text
freq = {}
for i in out:
if i in freq: freq[i] += 1.
else: freq[i] = 1.
N = len(out)
en = 0
for i in freq.values():
p = i/N
en -= p*log(p)
if en < besten:
besten = en
bestkey = key
bestout = ''.join(out[:20])
if count % 500 == 0: print count, key, bestkey,besten,bestout
print count, key, bestkey,besten,bestout


## Sunday, 9 October 2016

### CODZ 8. sha_paper

I havn't actually played the game, I just like breaking codes.

Apparently there are some new CODZ ciphers, the transcripts can be seen here: http://www.callofdutyzombies.com/topic/183529-all-revelations-ciphers-texture-files/#comment-1759652.

This post will look at the following cipher:

bx re yh zy bf lm kt ut yg se tb sx ky co jh km aq we tx wx
cy ji ut vt kn vc gx aw ij av qn lg ef fj uq bd kn sv cx fn
je wr rk kn cg aw xq vn zf li fh vz wt ta ia ij zf eh uf tj
qm yg hl yq cx ij vw ig de qz tg nj rs er vk tm sa yv tw hr
hs lt vy kr qc tv gh hb jn yb qh er ut gk et cs wv jl rh xo
wr ex hr xt zi kc xs qs fd wd cm ku ah fh fj lf ui ly sh vf
au xm hx qw dl gi cx vb dh wt xm kv un ej kt kt ye cq jd ef
eh zv xt he uz tg cl jw nr tw ur vo jt jo ru iq iy rz ey ho
gd nq yn bq ul ai fh bu ji ho nw qg yg vj if yv zu id jc gh
ke xr qf cq ra it gw dl fc gq ti iu qu ny vr gy sj rh iu hi
wr mv ym zi lk re vk xu ry uq gs ve gd yn bq ch ky er qh jr
ho ya el ky zj ei hz cb if dk


There are 460 characters total, 25 distinct characters, IC is 0.0418. Counts:

a: 12, c: 18, b: 11, e: 23, d: 12, g: 20,
f: 19, i: 24, h: 29, k: 21, j: 23, m: 9,
l: 14, o:  7, n: 15, q: 23, s: 12, r: 24,
u: 20, t: 26, w: 18, v: 23, y: 25, x: 19,
z: 13

Since this cipher uses pairs of characters, and there are 25 distinct characters, it is highly likely to be foursquare, bifid, playfair or some other digraphic substitution cipher based on a 5 by 5 grid. Usually I and J are combined, but it looks like in this cipher P is missing, so It was combined with something else.

Other ciphers that use a 25 letter alphabet include BAZERIES, BIFID, CADENUS, CHECKERBOARD, CM BIFID, FOURSQUARE, PHILLIPS, PHILLIPS-C, PHILLIPS-RC, PLAYFAIR, SERIATED PLAYFAIR, TRI-SQUARE, TWIN BIFID and TWO-SQUARE. Unfortunately this is quite a lot, and trying them all will be time consuming.

I am trying 4 variants of the above the cipher, the original cipher: bkreyh..., the reversed cipher: kdfibc..., forward but with each pair reversed: xberhy..., and each pair forwards, but the pairs from last to first: dkifcb... .

BAZERIES is a substitution + transposition, which means its IC would be that of normal text. Since the IC of this text is ~0.04, I am confident in saying it is not BAZERIES . It also can't be CADENUS because the message length is not a multiple of 25. CHECKERBOARD uses a 5x5 key square, but can at maximum use 20 characters in the ciphertext.

Possibilities after thinking a bit: BIFID, CM BIFID, TWIN BIFID, FOURSQUARE, PHILLIPS, PLAYFAIR, SERIATED PLAYFAIR, TRI-SQUARE, and TWO-SQUARE. The next piece of information is that none of the letter pairs in the ciphertext contain a doubled letter e.g. AA, BB, CC etc. This is highly unlikely to occur with most ciphers, but it is a peculiarity of PLAYFAIR. So this puts playfair near the top of the list.

I have tried the playfair cryptanalysis program over here on all four variants and it hasn't worked. I did a test sentence of the same length which it cracked in just a few iterations, so I am fairly confident in saying it is not a vanilla playfair, or at least if it is then something else is going on as well (such as some sort of route cipher).

For bifid, there is no obvious period identifiable (see here for how to compute it), and some quick simulated annealing didn't turn anything up.

Regarding the possibility of routes, 460 has a lot of factors: 2x230,4x115,5x92,10x45,20x23. This means lots of routes around the rectangles when the characters are lined up right. Exploring this would add a lot of extra time to the cracking effort.

The quest continues...

## Saturday, 8 October 2016

### CODZ cipher 13. kin_paper_torn straddle checkerboard?

I haven't actually played the game, I just like breaking codes.

Apparently there are some new CODZ ciphers, the transcripts can be seen here: http://www.callofdutyzombies.com/topic/183529-all-revelations-ciphers-texture-files/#comment-1759652.

This post will look at the following cipher:

@CB?>?>C@F?A?>CCCG??@C>?@C@C>???G=?C?=C@CGBC@CB?G@A
?=CB?C?G<?>CB@C=CB?<FG<?>C>C>CA?B?AGA?F?C?@CA?G=?B?>C@B?

# TLDR

EDIT: I'm beginning to think that this is not the final decryption, that they have used a slightly modified method which results in some extra characters. There is too much decrypted for me to think that it is totally wrong, but I believe there is an extra step I'm missing somewhere in the middle. </EDIT>

The ciphertext is a straddle checkerboard. Converting the 10 symbols to digits, and reversing the string, we get (using @=0, C=1, B=2, ?=3, >=4, F=5, A=6, G=7, = is 8, <=9, Note that this mapping is arbitrary, and any other mapping would work just as well):

320143238736103135367632361414143975932181021439731321 83607321012710183138733341010341033711143635014343210

See the link for a description of the straddle checkerboard. Using this key:

  0123456789
C.D.JYPEKW
1 NXV.T.QFUL
3 ZSOGIARVBH

The message decrypts to OCTOBERNSAREFORTTTHEYFOUNDTHESOURCEONVENUSBEGINNINGEXTRACTION. with spaces: OCTOBER NSA REPORT T THEY FOUND THE SOURCE ON VENUS BEGINNING EXTRACTION. There are likely a couple characters wrong still, or the slight mistakes are intentional.

# My approach

There are 10 different characters, 107 in total. The counts for each character are as follows: A: 6, @: 11, C: 24, B: 9, G: 8, F: 3, =: 5, <: 3, ?: 28, >: 10. It so happens that 10 characters can be converted to digits, so we can look at existing ciphers that use digits e.g. the straddle checkerboard, GRANDPRE, MONOME-DINOME, MORBIT, NIHILIST SUBSTITUTION, POLLUX or TRIDIGITAL. There are probably also more.

Converted to digits it is: 0123434105363411173301430101433378313810172101237063812313 7934120181239579341414163236763531301637832341023. If you reverse it, you get 320143238736103135367632361414143975932181021439731321 83607321012710183138733341010341033711143635014343210. I'll be talking about the non reversed ciphertext, but I'll be applying all the steps to both just in case. Using the above ciphertext and this calculator, we can compute the most likely cipher algorithms, and it has concluded that it is most likely a nihilist substitution. Unfortunately, it can't be nihilist because it has an odd number of characters, and nihilist requires even. It can't be grandpre for the same reason. CryptoCrack (from here) can't break it as GRANDPRE, MORBIT, NIHILIST SUBSTITUTION, POLLUX or TRIDIGITAL.

That really only leaves straddle checkerboard as the last candidate from the ciphers I can think of. Assuming it is a straddle checkerboard, we first have to find to location of the blanks in the key. If we can find those locations, we can decrypt in with any letters and we will have a plain substitution cipher. There are 10 choose 2 = 45 ways of putting the first 2 blanks, and 20 choose 2 = 190 ways of putting the second. This means there are 45*190 = 8550 possible configurations of putting the blanks. Some of these will be invalid though, e.g. the key:

   0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
f k m   c p d   y e
3: h b i g q r o s a z
7: l u t j n w v x    

can't have 38, 39, 78 or 79 in the ciphertext. If these numbers do exist in the ciphertext, then this is not a possible set of blanks. After trying to decrypt our ciphertext with all 8550 keys, only 3340 are actually valid blank positions. In addition to this, most of the blank positions result in identical outputs to other blank positions, so we can discard all the duplicate outputs, leaving only 45 substitution ciphers that we have to try.

After trying to decrypt the resulting 45 substitution ciphers from the forward cipher and another 45 from the reversed cipher, one of the decrypts, namely SALSYFWIRVWFESWLLLZFDHSOIBLZFRSOWAFSIKFIORYFTUIIUITFJLWVALUSI, can be decrypted to OCTOBERNSAREFORTTTHEYWOUNDTHESOURCEONMENUSBEGINNINGEXTRACTION. There are likely a couple characters wrong still, or the slight mistakes are intentional.

This is a bit of python code that will spit out the possible substitution ciphers for a given straddle checkerboard ciphertext (Please excuse the rough code, I wrote everything pretty quick):

I have actually since discovered there is a much shorter way of getting to the final candidates, but I'll leave this code here. To rank the final candidates, use index of coincidence, the correct one is almost always the one with the IC closest to 0.07.

import random
import sys
from itertools import combinations

ctext = '6909746723099383772753870703607230943837727093872638757438333832743772974928387272384175943874720383270'

''' decrypt a straddle checkerboard cipher ctext given a key
key should look like e.g. 'fkm.cpd.yehbigqrosazlutjnwvx..'
it should be 30 chars in length, and have 4 dots.
2 dots in the first 10 chars, and 2 in the last 20.
- if it returns 0 in the first result, the key was invalid
def scdecrypt(ctext,key):
dotpos = []
for i,k in enumerate(key):
if k == '.': dotpos.append(i)
output = ""
if dotpos[0] > 9: return 0,output
if dotpos[1] > 9: return 0,output
if dotpos[2] < 10: return 0,output
if dotpos[3] < 10: return 0,output
flag = 0
for cc in ctext:
c = int(cc)
if key[c] != '.' and flag == 0:
output += key[c]
elif flag == 1:
if key[10+c] == '.': return 0,""
output += key[10+c]
flag = 0
elif flag == 2:
if key[20+c] == '.': return 0,""
output += key[20+c]
flag = 0
elif c == dotpos[0]: flag = 1
elif c == dotpos[1]: flag = 2
else:
return 0,output
return 1,output

''' see if word and ct are possibly the same substitution cipher
returns 0 in the first part of the result if they are not '''
def canstart(ct,word):
key = {}
if len(word) > len(ct): return 0,key
for i,char in enumerate(word):
if ct[i] not in key:
if char not in key.values():
key[ct[i]] = char
else: return 0,key
elif key[ct[i]] == char: pass
else: return 0,key
return 1,key

# get a list of all the possible blank spot permutations
dp = []
a = combinations(range(10),2)
for i in a:
b = combinations(range(20),2)
for j in b:
dotpos = list(i)
dotpos.append(10+j[0])
dotpos.append(10+j[1])
dp.append(dotpos)

# we have all possible blank spot positions, try decrypting with each and see if we can discard any
count = 0
texts = []
for d in dp:
key = list('ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ')
for pos in d: key.insert(pos,'.')

bool,ptext = scdecrypt(ctext,key)
if bool == 0: continue
texts.append(ptext)
count += 1

# now we have a heap of valid decrypts, discard duplicates
lst = []
for i in range(len(texts)):
cs = False
for j in range(len(lst)):
if canstart(lst[j],texts[i])[0]: cs = True
if not cs: lst.append(texts[i])

# print the unique possible decrypts, they must be solved as substitution ciphers
for i,j in enumerate(range(len(lst))):
print lst[j]