Is it possible to craft a valid AES-CBC cipher-text that will decrypt (to random) with any possible key?

cmdruid

7/4/24, 12:09 AM

I am mainly looking to perform this trick for fun. I have access to an API that uses WebCrypto under the hood for encrypt and decrypt methods. I would like to hijack the decrypt method in order to create a deterministic seed.

I have read other articles, and it seems like this trick should be relatively straight-forward, as AES-CBC does not have any integrity checks (that I know of). My understanding is that if the block-padding is correct, then a standard cipher-text payload should successfully decrypt using any secret key, even if that payload decrypts into random nonsense.

In practice, this doesn't appear to work, and I am not sure why. I can brute-force my way through by starting with a payload and iv of all zeroes, and incrementing by one until I produce a valid cipher-text that can be decrypted by a given key, but that cipher-text will fail when decrypted by another key.

I would like to figure out, if possible, how to craft a cipher-text that has no known solution, but can be decrypted by any given key in order to produce a deterministic random seed.

Any help or expertise would be greatly appreciated, as I would like to show this off for an upcoming hackathon event. Thank you!

0 + 3

aes

cbc

pseudo-random-generator

Maarten Bodewes

7/4/24, 3:08 AM

You're failing because the PKCS#7 compatible padding will (most likely) fail. If you can try and use CTR mode instead, as it doesn't pad, or unpad.

canary

7/4/24, 7:37 AM

I think it's straight forward if the decryption key is fixed for every (attack) session.

canary

7/4/24, 7:44 AM

is it you who provides the IV to the Oracle decryption? if so, you can just try 256 IVs at most to get a valid decryption.

Elon Musk

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EN: Is it possible to craft a valid AES-CBC cipher-text that will decrypt (to random) with any possible key?

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