TJCTF 2016 Writeups

In which we hack our way to second place.

Friday, June 10, 2016 · 4 min read

I just realized that TJCTF happened a really long time ago, and so it’s probably okay for me to share these writeups. Enjoy.

curvature2

A CTF is a rough road

When you play on hard mode

My tactics are frugal

My weapon is Google

All I do is search for code

The time is 2:00am. In the distance, you can hear the city breathe softly. It is the sound of night: when the hackers like you rise from their sleeping bags to reclaim what is rightly theirs.

You unholster your keyboard and turn off the safety.

You’re trying to take a discrete log in an elliptic curve’s group: a gnarly beast so powerful, it is used by the Browsers to protect User Privacy. You wonder briefly who put you up to this gig, and make a mental note to charge them overtime. Discrete log? What are you, some sort of lumberjack?

There are two kinds of hackers: those that hack in style and those that get the job done. You are the latter.

You rev up the ol’ browser and go on a wild-Google-hunt for attacks on elliptic curve discrete logs. Cryptographic protocols come and go, you say to nobody in particular, but Google is here to stay. You swerve past some lecture notes and duck a Wikipedia article; before anyone can say “Pollard Rho”, you find Matthew Musson’s paper[0] which mentions a whole variety of attacks on the elliptic curve discrete log. “Sweetheart,” you say, pointing to the bean-shooter in your holster, “me and my friend here think you’d better start talking.”

The pages read like molasses; progress is slower than Windows XP. But just as the rays of dawn begin to reach over the netscape to reveal golden cloud computers, your luck changes. Turns out that there’s an attack on the elliptic curve discrete log problem which works when the size of the elliptic group is equal to the size of the field over which the elliptic curve lives (a so-called “anomalous” curve). The attack’s by someone who thinks they’re Smart—and you ain’t complaining.

You call up your friend Sage; you need to pull a favor. Sage confirms that your curve is in fact anomalous. You tell him you owe him a drink and hang up. What are friends for?

You don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble. But soon you realize that this is not a reasonable amount of trouble. This is a downright unreasonable amount of trouble, and you ain’t takin’ it. You’re way too lazy to implement this attack on your own. But you know someone down at Github’s probably knows how to whip it up. You order an “elliptic anomalous curve attack”, and Github obliges[1]. You tip the guy a star and drive off in the boiler before anyone can ask any questions.

Back at the office, you substitute in your curve’s parameters, and turn the crank. Out comes a hex-encoded string shaped suspiciously like a flag.

“What is it?” asks Sage.

“Oh,” you say, “just the stuff that dreams are made of.”

You’re good. You’re very good.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/file.PostFileLoader.html?id=5583faed6225ff040e8b458b&assetKey=AS%3A273804985602059%401442291603545

[1] https://gist.github.com/elliptic-shiho/e76e7c2a2aff228d7807

luvmarkdown

Flag à la Grandma’s Cookies

Preparation time: 3 hours Serves: A team of 4

Ingredients:

Step 1. Prepare a fresh exploit payload in JavaScript for the user to execute. You want the flag’s address. Poisoning the user’s cookie to be yours would work because the “recent” beacon would update when the user navigates away from the flag page.

Step 2. Insert the exploit payload in a script tag, knowing that showdown doesn’t sanitize HTML. Report it so that the simulated user views it. See nothing. Realize that there’s a very strict CSP in place that prevents inline JavaScript.

Step 3. Realize that the only way to inject the payload is by having it loaded by existing code on the same origin. Realize that the “raw” url allows you to serve an XSS payload on the same origin.

Step 4. Submit your payload to the markdown renderer, then save the URL. Create a fresh submission that creates a script element whose source is that URL. Submit and report. See nothing. Realize that inserting an element counts as inline JavaScript, which the CSP hates.

Step 5. Notice that the client-side viewer code loads the markdown renderer dynamically based on the value of a DOM element. Create a doppelganger element with the same ID as the renderer-selection dropdown. Since this element is spliced in before the actual dropdown, it gets selected by the viewer code. Set this element’s value property to the URL of your payload from (4). Submit and report.

Step 6. Copy the URL that appears in the list of recently viewed pages. Visit the URL to obtain the flag.

Step 7. Serve flag while hot (do not hoard). Bon appétit.

tsundere

Once upon a time, there was a piece of Java bytecode. That Java bytecode felt incomplete and unloved, but then she met a CTF team willing to help it. Though busy seeking flags in foreign lands and CPU architectures, the CTF team felt a moral obligation to help, and so it tried to help the Java bytecode discover her true identity. However, it was too difficult to understand her in her current form. So, the CTF team converted her to a format recognized by the Jasmin assembler [0] and found her source.

Looking at the source, the CTF team knew exactly where she came from: even without the four magic numbers she had forgotten, the team recognized the undeniable signs of her being an md5 implementation which chunked input matching [a-z0-9] in blocks of 5 and concatenated the checksums.

Happy at last with her new identity, it sent off the Java bytecode to find new adventures in an exciting, beautiful world. But one task remained.

In under an hour, a parallelized md5 cracker revealed each of the twenty cleartext blocks that produced the hash embedded within the Java bytecode’s soul. It was, unmistakably, the Flag the team had sought for so long.

Moral: Kindness is always repayed.

[0] http://jasmin.sourceforge.net/

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