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The Matasano crypto challenges (2014)
- dang 3y agoRelated. Others? The Matasano Crypto Challenges (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15036766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15036766 - Aug 2017 (29 comments) The cryptopals crypto challenges - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12720009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12720009 - Oct 2016 (50 comments) The Matasano Crypto Challenges - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8166064 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8166064 - Aug 2014 (71 comments) Ask HN: What happened to the The Matasano Crypto Challenges? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5722339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5722339 - May 2013 (9 comments) The Matasano Crypto Challenges - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5586543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5586543 - April 2013 (34 comments) The Matasano Crypto Challenges - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5574074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5574074 - April 2013 (61 comments)
- pietroppeter 3y agoLoved the exchange between sdevlin and FiloSottile on Oct 2016 edition! Thanks for linking related content dang!
- SilasX 3y agoI had a lot of fun with these! Only complaint is that in section 4 the deliverable becomes increasingly vague. Edit: also, a surprising observation about it: the challenges fall into two categories: A) implement this off-the-shelf standard (for encryption, hashing, whatever), and B) with these hints, come up with a clever way to break this cryptosystem. Unexpectedly, I found the A)s harder, because the existing explanations of the standards I found online were really bad, or the libraries were hard to work with. By contrast, the clever attacks were easy!
- tptacek 3y agoI think set 4 was our least favorite; 1-6 were all done at roughly the same time, and I think there's some filler in 4. Set 8 is obviously the best, followed I think by 6.
- nptacek 3y agothese were a ton of fun. highly recommend them
- troismph 3y agoReally enjoyed this. A good introduction on (the REAL) cryptography.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoMatasano in Spanish is a term for a bad doctor that kills healthy people.
- tptacek 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4684845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4684845
- krsna 3y agoNice origin story! Confusing Matasano and Monsanto is like confusing Spotify and Shopify. With a relatively high number of common letters between names, it's not totally surprising that they'd get mixed up.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoFrom sidethread there: > There are many examples of ordinary names representing extraordinary businesses. Apple. Four Seasons. Amazon. These names evoke excellence because the underlying services are excellent. Strong brands today will fade tomorrow once quality suffers. Think GM, Dell, and Sears. These were once among the most respected brands in America. It's interesting to see just how much effort Amazon has put into trashing their own brand, only ten years later.
- del_operator 3y agoStill think about ETAOIN SHLDRU when making wordle guesses because of this
- technion 3y agoThe padding oracle challenge has just been the gift that keeps on giving. I wrote a Ruby Gem for exploiting this: https://github.com/technion/paddingoracle https://github.com/technion/paddingoracle I've since used it in the wild several times. It is shocking how prevalent the issue is, I suspect because everybody "used a a trusted AES library" and therefore believes they've complied with general crypto recommendations. Before /r/javascript went private recently I could reply to a post about nearly any project that claimed to use crypto and explain this vulnerability.
- tptacek 3y agoIn fairness, the CBC oracle was by some margin the most widely exploited vulnerability in cryptography prior to our challenges. I credit us a little bit with popularizing the BB'98 RSA padding oracle, though, which is similarly prevalent.
- EGreg 3y agoDo you consider HMAC-SHA1 to still be secure for the foreseeable future? Or you know of something that can get close to breaking it? It seems to be quantum-resistant too.
- mewmew07 3y agoI think this is answered in the 'Symmetric “Signatures”' section of the Cryptographic Right Answers blog post of 2018. > Avoid: custom “keyed hash” constructions, HMAC-MD5, HMAC-SHA1, complex polynomial MACs, encrypted hashes, CRC. https://latacora.micro.blog/2018/04/03/cryptographic-right-answers.html https://latacora.micro.blog/2018/04/03/cryptographic-right-a...
- maple3142 3y agoAnother similar website for people who like this: https://cryptohack.org/ https://cryptohack.org/ It is like cryptopals, but in a Catch The Flag format. Many challenges on cryptopals do exist on CryptoHack too, but CryptoHack also have some even harder challenges to solve.
- hyper_reality 3y agoThanks for mentioning CryptoHack! Yes while some challenges overlap, we also explore more deeply the mathematics of cryptography, as well as its practical use in protocols like TLS. We recently added challenges on lattice-based post-quantum cryptography. In this way it makes a great complement to CryptoPals. But it's not all harder, our introductory section gradually introduces concepts like base64 encoding and the modulo operator one challenge at a time.
- EGreg 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- starttoaster 3y agoI’m not sure if you intended on having actual replies to your comment; actually I’m unsure of what your intention was when writing your comment at all. But to make a small distinction with what you said referring to crypto [blockchains, cryptocurrencies], the scams you’re referring to are mostly enabled by centralized currency exchanges (like Coinbase, Bitmart, etc) and trading assets on an actual blockchain should be far safer. The problem with using blockchain in this way is that it has a much higher barrier to entry, needing to know a lot more about your particular blockchain to participate with transactions outside of those centralized exchanges. Coinbase and the like make interacting with blockchain and their underlying currencies much simpler, but they also kind of defeat the whole purpose of having a decentralized ledger.
- SehajPasricha 3y agoare there any websites like this but in context of cybersecurity?
- bawolff 3y agoWhat do you mean by "cybersecurity"? Cryptography exploits like this site are certainly a part of cybersecurity. There are lots of challenge type security websites out there for various types of computer security. Some of my personal favourites include https://microcorruption.com/ https://microcorruption.com/ and https://overthewire.org/wargames/natas/ https://overthewire.org/wargames/natas/ . Check out also https://ctftime.org https://ctftime.org for live competitions
- cinntaile 3y agoMicrocorruption redirects to https://www.nccgroup.com/us/ https://www.nccgroup.com/us/ and I can't locate the challenges so I assume they're gone.
- hyper_reality 3y agoHackTheBox (https://www.hackthebox.com/ https://www.hackthebox.com/) is the largest and most active hacker challenge website. Focussed mainly around black box pentesting of vulnerable Windows and Linux machines, but they have lots of other types of content these days too such as CTF challenges and paid lab environments.
- KingMob 3y agoAhh, these were so much fun. I should get around to finishing them some day.
- londons_explore 3y agoI am disappointed in the field of cryptography. I feel like everyone settles for crypto that is 'just strong enough', and it turns out to be broken a decade later. I would like to be able to put openssl into "100 year crypto" mode, which means it refuses to encrypt/decrypt/hash anything with any algorithm that doesn't have general consensus among experts that it is unlikely to be broken in 100 years. We keep using algorithms like SHA1/MD5/SHA256 that merely mix bits with no theoretical basis, and just hope nobody figures out how to unmix them. Yet historically people usually do!
- eru 3y agoWe have some amazing theory around cryptography, but we have no theory that's good enough for your '100 year crypto' goal.
- baobabKoodaa 3y agoWell, depends what you want to do. If you can get away with using a one-time pad, that's 100 year crypto for you.
- tptacek 3y agoIf you're storing a message for 100 years, and you're considering a one-time pad, just put the plaintext message wherever it is you plan to hide the equally long key for 100 years. "You can use a one-time pad" is a little like saying "you can just not encrypt".
- baobabKoodaa 3y agoI don't really get the hostility in your response. Yes, one-time pads are not a practical solution for most use cases, but I never claimed they would be. I was just making a point about their "theoretically unbreakable" property, which I thought is interesting in this context.
- 3y ago
- bekantan 3y agoMore fun challenges (unofficial Set 9) for those who completed all 8 sets: https://ilchen.github.io/cryptopals/newproblems.html https://ilchen.github.io/cryptopals/newproblems.html
- bloat 3y agoThere was another crypto challenge like this somewhere, it had a similar start IIRC, building up from simple encodings to basic cyphers, but you had to put your answer for one question into the website to reveal the next question. I lost the link before I ever got too far in, any ideas what I am remembering? Thanks
- bradleyjg 3y agoI recommend this and Dan Boneh‘s crypto I MOOC to all my SWE reports. You’ll get enough familiarity to use libraries well and enough fear to avoid rolling your own.
- mewmew07 3y agoanother opportunity to complain about the demise of starfighter