This is the seventh challenge of Set 1 in The Cryptopals Crypto Challenges website. Previously, I spoke about these challenges and provided walkthroughs for the previous challenges, if you haven't read them, here are the links:

For this challenge, you are given a file, which contains a ciphertext that has been encrypted using AES-128 Cipher with ECB (Electronic Codebook) mode and then encoded using Base64. Decrypt it.

In order to decrypt it, you are given a key:

YELLOW SUBMARINE

What is AES?

Advanced Encryption Standard a.k.a Rjindael, which was developed by two belgian cryptographers, Vincent Rijmen and Joan Daemen. Rjindael is a family of ciphers with various block and key sizes.

AES-128 is commonly used but there are also larger key sizes such as 192 and 256 bits. Similar to XOR cipher, it uses the same key to encrypt and decrypt the message. Till date, there isn't any publication that states if whether AES is broken but even if you were to break it, it will take atleast a billion years with a supercomputer, which could beyond the age of the universe.

What is ECB Mode?

What if your plaintext is longer than (in this case, 128 bits) the keysize? This is where ECB comes into the picture. ECB (Electronic Codebook) is a cipher mode that is used to repeat the key until it covers the entire plaintext (similar to Repeating-Key XOR Cipher) and then each block is independently encrypted using the AES algorithm to produce the desired ciphertext.

This challenge is not that hard, in fact, it's completely trivial and more like an introduction of AES Cipher. There are so many ways to solve this problem but I chose to solve this problem using OpenSSL and other commandline tools such as xxd (used to print the hexdump of a file) on my UNIX terminal.

Here's the solution:

openssl enc -aes-128-ecb -d -a -in secret.txt -K $(echo "YELLOW SUBMARINE" | xxd -p) -iv 1 | head

This is the decrypted message:

I'm back and I'm ringin' the bell
A rockin' on the mike while the fly girls yell
In ecstasy in the back of me
Well that's my DJ Deshay cuttin' all them Z's
Hittin' hard and the girlies goin' crazy
Vanilla's on the mike, man I'm not lazy.

I'm lettin' my drug kick in
It controls my mouth and I begin
To just let it flow, let my concepts go

Initially, I was planning to write an implementation of AES for fun, but then I decided to make it a side project that I can work on as there are a lot of things about AES that I'd like to talk about in the future.

Stay tuned for the next challenge!