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FIRST Robotics Competition used to distribute the rulebook for the season in an encrypted PDF. The password and unencrypted copies were released after the live
by moftz 7y ago
FIRST Robotics Competition used to distribute the rulebook for the season in an encrypted PDF. The password and unencrypted copies were released after the live kickoff stream. Ten years ago we'd be busting ass trying to crack the PDF but techniques weren't great then.
- AlphaWeaver 7y agoThis is still how the rules are distributed today. I wonder if we'll see teams using this technique this year. Edit: It looks like this technique wouldn't be useful, since its an exfiltration technique and not a flaw in the encryption algorithm.
- pietroglyph 7y agoFRC was the thing I immediately thought about when I saw this (they still do PDF encryption), but the techniques here don't really apply. I'm pretty sure that you could just try to brute force it, as the passwords as usually dictionary-based with substitutions (e.g. R0bot$InSp&ce). Edit: After taking a much more in-depth look at it, all of the past game manuals' passwords are too complex to crack in a reasonable time (even with a dictionary). With a top 1000 word list dictionary with substitutions of 3-letter words like the above there are (conservatively) 1x10^20 combinations. You can't crack the PDF user key directly either, because recent game manuals use 256-bit AES keys.