Cryptopals

This are my solutions to the Matasano Cryptopals cryptographic challenges.

The code is written in pure Python 3 and it is extensively documented.

How to run

I recommend using a Python virtual environment. Here is a very small cheat sheet for it:

# Install virtualenv if not already installed
$ pip3 install virtualenv

# Create the virtual environment
$ virtualenv -p python3 venv

# Activate the virtual environment
$ source venv/bin/activate

# Install the dependencies
$ pip3 install requests 
$ pip3 install flask 
$ pip3 install pycrypto

# Deactivate the environment (after you are done running the challenges):
$ deactivate

When the environment is ready, you can run each challenge by simply calling python S*C**.py, after replacing * with the number of the set, and ** with the number of the challenge. Beware that:

• Some challenges take a long time to run.
• For some challenges you might need to run the server first.

What are these challenges?

Cryptopals is a collection of exercises that demonstrate attacks on real world ciphers and protocols. Exercises exploit both badly designed systems and subtle implementation bugs in theoretically rock solid crypto.

Thoughts and notes

These challenges are among the best programming / math / crypto exercises I have done.

By solving all of them not only I learned more about applied cryptography, but also I honed my programming skills in Python.

I wrote down some thoughts and notes in the comments of the code.

As an additional note, I personally found sets 5 and 6 to be - on average - easier than the previous ones, although in the website they state that they should be "significantly harder".

Coming in the future

• Solutions to sets 7 and 8: I am looking forward to when the set 8 challenges will be published on the website.

Contribute

Please feel invited to contribute by creating a pull request to submit the code or bug fixes you would like to be included in my solutions.

License

Everything in this repository is distributed under the terms of the MIT License. See file "LICENSE" for further reference.