ångstromCTF 2020 - RSA-OTP Writeup

For this challenge we are provided with the server source:

At the beginning I was a little bit confused by the comments: usually when something is pointed to as secure, it is what you have to break; unfortunately not this time. So I spent some hours trying to factorize and to attack directly the otp function.
Then I tried to modify one of our attempt to break otp: in fact it is an oracle and in particular it leaks the lenght of the decrypted message.
The first thing to notice is that if we send to the server and , then (calling the decrypted ):

• if is even, then the second response is exactly one bit shorter then the first one
• if is odd, the lengths of the first and second response are uncorrelated

Don’t worry, we can still recover our flag: in fact is odd, thus if we could operate on the decrypted we ccould also change it from odd to even by adding . But what happens?
We are working modulo , so we have and . This means that if at some point is even, then sending we know the length of , otherwise we know the length of .

We can extend the reasoning to more than one bit. Let’s construct in this way:

• send to the server the encrypted flag (let’s call it ) and call the bit length of the response
• send to the server and call the bit length of the response
• if is equal to , then prepend a 0 to , otherwise a (we are interpreting in binary)
• repeat these steps enough (we need bits)

We can now notice that after steps we know the parity of (let’s call it ), so we can recover the last bits of as .
That’s all: we can recover all the bits of , leading us to the flag actf{this_is_not_what_i_meant_when_i_told_you_to_use_rsa_with_padding}.