Reversing Globetrotter Flexcrypt
Key Extraction and Encryption Algorithm Reversing
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17 September 1999
by Nolan Blender
Courtesy of Fravia's page of reverse engineering
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Nolan Blender
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PC
Encryption Algorithm Reversing... yumm! And Nolan Blender is showing here a very "professional" approach that will benefit all reversers (and all protectors) alike: this is not a reading for the casual cracker, though. Newbies beware.
Even if Nolan Blender's didactic approach, with questions and answers, will be very useful for ANYONE seriously interested in cryptoreversing.
Woa! "Cryptoreverser"... sounds like Cryptreverser, scary eh?
On a sidenote: Many essays like this one went evidently lost in my "great August floods" of Yahoomail. Please re-send.
There is a crack, a crack in everything That's how the light gets in
Rating
( )Beginner (X)Intermediate (X)Advanced ( )Expert

Here we extend the excellent work by Pilgrim (pilgrim2.htm: Pilgrim's Further FlexCrypt analysis, see also flexm11.htm: FlexLm handy hints and pflexlo1.htm: FlexLock...less secure than the rest of FLEXlm) on the workings of Flexcrypt. The true value here is not in the keys or files that you will be able to generate after reading this essay, but in understanding how weak algorithms can compromise security. I will provide information so that seekers of knowledge can understand and reproduce what has been revealed (for there is no substitute for doing) but this is not truly required for getting some value from this essay.
Reversing Globetrotter Software's Flexcrypt
Key Extraction and Encryption Algorithm Reversing.
Written by Nolan Blender


Introduction

Flexcrypt is used by Globetrotter to try to prevent unauthorized parties from acquiring information and examining it. From a cryptographic point of view, the capability of this software is not adaquate. The "key" which is provided in most cases is an authorization code only, and does not contain cryptographic information required to decode the encrypted file - it is only an index into a table of existing keys which are stored within the executable. Two methods of attacking this program will be described. The first method is an attack on the key generator. The second method examines the algorithm used in the encryption.

Tools required
dde | softice
Some patience.

Target's URL/FTP
ftp://ftp.globes.com

Program History
Little is known about the origin of this program. Analysis of the design of the program shows that it is a modification of the licensing software, and was probably used to proved "secure" distribution of software to authorized customers and third parties.

Essay

The information provided here doesn't provide much additional ability to decode over Pilgrim's essay on Flexcrypt. That essay provides enough information to decode flexcrypted files. After reading this essay, it should be apparent that the security provided for the encrypted files is minimal, and this program should not be used for anything that requires even minimal security. Reading and understanding this essay will give you the ability to generate flexcrypt keys using makekey and to write programs that are capable of automatically decoding flexcrypted files.

The first attempt at building a key generator used vendor keys extracted from the global data area of the running program, and converted to version 6. An area matching the fc_keytab was found, and an fc_keytab table was generated that would produce an identical table to the one in core. I could not get the Globetrotter version 6 makekey program to generate keys that would work with the version 5.11 version of flexcrypt. I decided that obtaining the correct version of flexcrypt would be required.

The version 5.11 flexcrypt kit is not encoded with that version of flexcrypt - an older variant is used. The methods that Pilgrim used to extract the keys, such as breaking in sprintf statements, was used to extract a set of possible keys. There is no checksum confirmation process for that earlier version of flexcrypt, so a file for each of the decrypted strings was generated, then a decompression attempt was done on each of the files. Two files passed the full decompression test, corresponding to entry 32 in the decryption table. One of the entries was for the specific host that I was decrypting on, the other key was for ANY host.

The key to decode the flexcrypt 5.11 kit is 5537-2182-6912-6163-32 - I provide this so that interested parties can follow along.

The locations where the encryption keys xored with vendor_key5 were both 0, so I didn't worry about these yet. I built a trial makekey program with the kit, using vendor keys extracted from the global memory area. Vendor_key5 was derived from a custom program, although the standard technique of using l_svk to extract this key would work as well.

The compiler aligns the structure so that each element will start on a word boundary, and then pads the rest of the structure with nulls. The pattern that I saw showed a pattern of xxxxxxxx xx000000 when I used my own data, so I looked for a similar pattern in core. I used the pattern that they suggest in their mycode.c file. The val1/val2 keys were extracted from the core file, and fed through the following program. 0xfe9f9a1d is actually vendorcode 5 for this product.

40001560: 6E20746F  20737464  6F75740A  00000000

Here we see the start of the vendorcode structure...
          V
          00040000  00000000  00000000  36448C29
40001580: AFD74F22  875F072B  53EDC41B  00000000
Start of fc_keytab structure.
          V
          16B658E8  F5000000  B590444E  56000000
400015A0: FE239DE3  1D000000  8D0C8951  6E000000
          2BE6A5B7  C8000000  C6DFD6E5  25000000

Once we have extracted the keys, they were organized into k1,k2 pairs, and then XORed with vendorkey5.

#include<stdio.h>
main()
{
    unsigned long val1;
    unsigned long val2;
    char instr[1024];
    int i = 0;
    while (fgets(instr,1024,stdin)) {
        sscanf(instr,"%x %x", &val1, &val2);
        val1 = val1 ^ 0xfe9f9a1d;
        val2 = val2 & 0xff ^ 0x1d;
        printf ("     { 0x%08x ^ K1,  K2(0x%02x)}, /* Offset %d */\n", val1, val 2,i);
        i++;
    }
}

The key table and the vendorcode values extracted from core are added to mycode.c, and then makekey generates correct decoding values. Vendor defined encryption is used to generate the decoding keys. lc_crypt() is used to generate a key, then it appears that custom modifications are done to the result by fc_crypt(). It may be possible to completely reverse the key generation mechanism, however this isn't required to decode the files.

Attacking the FLEXcrypt algorithm itself.

The algorithms that encode data in FLEXcrypt are very weak. There is a strong relationship between input and output data, and it is possible to derive the encryption key from a single plaintext/ciphertext pair. The process used to generate the real encryption keys use data more than once, making it possible to mostly verify whether a key is valid or not. Very little additional functionality was gained by cracking the algorithm, except for some minor convenience in figuring out the encryption code offset. It is satisfying to know exactly how something works, and to be able to reproduce the operation of a program completely. The attack on this part of the algorithm is independent of the attack on the makekey program. To decode the files with this method, vendorkey5 and the values of fc_keytab aren't required, only the real encryption key, and this can be be extracted from the encrypted file.

The Approach

The first part to reversing flexcrypt was to write a test program that called the actual encryption routines. The constituent files of the libraries were extracted, and encrypt.o was replaced by a test program which called the encryption code directly. This somewhat simplified the debugging process, and allowed modification of individual calls to library functions. The first call of interest is to fc_string_crypt.

The first key derivation comes in the fc_split_code() routine. This one was of interest as it took in data from fc_keytab, and the index into the encryption table. This indicated that it was involved in the key generation process. This routine takes the 40 bit key found in fc_keytab and merges them with VENDOR_CODE5 to produce a 64 bit key. The 64 bit key is the actual key used in the encryption operations. l_svk (which extracts VENDOR_CODE5 from the other 4 vendor codes) is actually called from within fc_split_code(). Here is a subroutine that has the same functionality, but it takes vendorcode5 as an argument.

/*******************************************************************************
 *
 * my_split_code
 *
 * This routine generates a split code (a full 64 bit key) from
 * vendorcode5 and the input key (first 5 bytes).
 * this was modified from the original code, and doesn't
 * reflect exactly how fc_split_code works, but the algorithm
 * is the same.
 *
 * inkey (input) 40 bit input key.
 * vc5 (input) 32 bit vendorcode5 key
 * outval(output) 64 bit split code.
********************************************************************************/
int my_split_code(char *inkey, char *vc5,  char *outval)
{
    unsigned long keys[8];
    unsigned long dbytes[5];
    unsigned long xorbytes[4];
    int i;

    /* Load keys */
    for (i = 0; i < 4; i++) {
        keys[i] = (unsigned long) (vc5[i] & 0xff);
    }
    /* Load data */
    for (i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
        dbytes[i] = (unsigned long) (inkey[i] & 0xff);
    }
    /* Build XOR'ed values */
    for (i = 0; i < 4; i++) {
        xorbytes[i] = dbytes[i] ^ keys[i];
    }
    outval[0] = xorbytes[3];
    outval[5] = xorbytes[2];
    outval[2] = xorbytes[1];
    outval[7] = xorbytes[0];
    outval[4] = dbytes[4];
    outval[1] = xorbytes[1] ^ xorbytes[0]; /* Redundant rule 1 */
    outval[6] = xorbytes[3] ^ dbytes[4];   /* Redundant rule 2 */
    outval[3] = xorbytes[2] ^ xorbytes[1]; /* Redundant rule 3 */
    return(0);
}

The three redundant rules allow us to check to see if the split code is correct with a very high degree of certainty. Why this is important will be demonstrated shortly.

The next interesting routine is fc_block_crypt. Calls to this routine were intercepted, and the arguments before and after the call were examined. The following observations were made.

The cipher is using cipher block chaining with the key as the initialization vector. I suppose some improvement could be had by using a random IV, but other weaknesses are still there to be exploited.

A special flexcrypt header is written to the output file, then the encrypted blocks are written sequentially to the output file.

What was that mystery code? As it turns out, it is the encryption offset turned into a string using this highly secret algorithm:

	sprintf(keystring, "%02x%03d%03d", offsetval,
offsetval, 255-offsetval);

What this means is that there are 256 possible plaintexts which can match the ciphertext. Since the encryption algorithm is so simple, it is a simple matter to extract the key given a plaintext/ciphertext pair. here is the encryption algorithm.

/*****************************************************************
 *
 * my_block_crypt:
 * this routine is is a combination permute/xor
transformation.
 * inkey(input) input encryption key
 * dval(input/output) block to be transformed.
*****************************************************************/
int my_block_crypt(char *inkey, char *dval)
{
	unsigned long keys[8];
	unsigned long dbytes[8];
	int i;
	/* Load keys */
	for (i = 0; i <8; i++) {
		keys[i] = (unsigned long) (inkey[i] & 0xff);
	}
	/* Load data */
	for (i = 0; i < 8; i++) {
		dbytes[i] = (unsigned long) (dval[i] & 0xff);
	}
	dval[0] = dbytes[7] ^ keys[3];
	dval[1] = dbytes[5] ^ keys[5];
	dval[2] = dbytes[4] ^ keys[1];
	dval[3] = dbytes[2] ^ keys[7];
	dval[4] = dbytes[6] ^ keys[2];
	dval[5] = dbytes[3] ^ keys[4];
	dval[6] = dbytes[0] ^ keys[0];
	dval[7] = dbytes[1] ^ keys[6];
	return(0);
}
Therefore
/*****************************************************************
 *
 * my_recover_key: 
 * recover key from a plaintext/ciphertext pair.
 *
 * nfb 22-aug-1999 - initial coding.
 *
*****************************************************************/
int my_recover_key(char *plaintext, char *ciphertext,
char *outkey)
{
	unsigned long ptext[8];
	unsigned long ctext[8];
	int i;
	/* Load plaintext */
	for (i = 0; i <8; i++) {
		ptext[i] = (unsigned long) (plaintext[i] & 0xff);
	}
	/* Load data */
	for (i = 0; i < 8; i++) {
		ctext[i] = (unsigned long) (ciphertext[i] & 0xff);
	}
	outkey[3] = ptext[7] ^ ctext[0];
	outkey[5] = ptext[5] ^ ctext[1];
	outkey[1] = ptext[4] ^ ctext[2];
	outkey[7] = ptext[2] ^ ctext[3];
	outkey[2] = ptext[6] ^ ctext[4];
	outkey[4] = ptext[3] ^ ctext[5];
	outkey[0] = ptext[0] ^ ctext[6];
	outkey[6] = ptext[1] ^ ctext[7];
	return(0);
}

Once we have the key, we can see if it's valid. This code validates the returned keys.

 int my_validate_key(char *inval)
 {
	int i;
	unsigned long dbytes[8];
	/* Transfer bytes */
	for (i = 0; i <8; i++) {
		dbytes[i] = (unsigned long) (inval[i] & 0xff);
	}
	/* Redundant rule 1 */
	if (dbytes[1] != (dbytes[2] ^ dbytes[7])) {
		return(-1);
	}
	/* Redundant rule 2 */
	if (dbytes[6] != (dbytes[0] ^ dbytes[4])) {
		return(-1);
	}
	/* Redundant rule 3 */
	if (dbytes[3] != (dbytes[5] ^ dbytes[2])) {
		return(-1);
	}
	/* All OK, return 0 */
	return(0);
}

The real decryption key can be located by cycling through the 256 possible indexes, checking to see if the resulting key passes validate_key, and using that key if one is found. If multiple keys are found, try the keys and check the output data. Most likely, one and only one key will be found. From this point it is a simple matter to decrypt the file a block at a time, and you will have your plaintext data.
Final Notes

Flexcrypt 5.11 does not offer very much protection to encrypted files. Cracking the program and the algorithms that it uses to encode files provides some useful insight into methods that can be used to attack encryption programs.

FlexLM is only minimally involved in this product, providing only the authorization process, and part of the key used to decrypt or encrypt files.

Here are some of my comments.

Decryption keys used to decode files should actually contain private information that is required to decode the file. In this case, the keys are stored within the decryption executable, reducing the problem to one of pure cracking and some trial and error if the data is all that is required.

A combination of weak encryption and known data encrypted into the header makes it possible to write automatic decryptors for any file encrypted by this program.

If the designers of this program had not distributed the keys with the decryptor, used a random initialization vector, and used even a little bit stronger encryption algorithm, the program would be much more resistant to direct attack.

Questions:
1.  Why should encryption algorithms rely on strong design rather
    than design secrecy?
2.  Why should encryption algorithms be resistant to known 
    plaintext attacks?
3.  Why should encryption programs avoid encrypting known data
    such as headers into files?
4.  Why did the NSA approve this program for export?
5.  Describe the decrypt_block algorithm.
Answers:
1.  Since there is always the possibility that the encryption
    process may be made available to cryptanalysists, it is
    highly unlikely that the actual encryption algorithm will
    remain secret.   Once the algorithm is known, any security
    from algorithm secrecy is lost.
2.  There is often a stereotyped beginning and/or ending to
    a message.  If the algorithm isn't resistant to known plaintext
    attacks, the encryption key can be derived from the 
    plaintext/ciphertext pairs, and the message can be decoded.
3.  This simplifies brute force attacks.  If a ciphertext/plaintext
    pair is known,  it may be possible to extract the key, depending
    on the strength of the algorithm.  Although encryption algorithms
    should provide protection against this, weaknesses in implementation
    may cause security weaknesses.  Questions 2 and 3 are closely 
    related.
4.  The real key length is short enough, and the algorithm weak 
    enough that it can easily be broken, thus providing no 
    secrecy advantage to foreign powers.
5.  
int my_block_crypt(char *inkey, char *dval)
{
	unsigned long keys[8];
	unsigned long dbytes[8];
	int i;
	/* Load keys */
	for (i = 0; i < 8; i++) {
		keys[i] = (unsigned long) (inkey[i] & 0xff);
	}
	/* Load data */
	for (i = 0; i < 8; i++) {
		dbytes[i] = (unsigned long) (dval[i] & 0xff);
	}
	dval[0] = dbytes[7] ^ keys[3];
	dval[1] = dbytes[5] ^ keys[5];
	dval[2] = dbytes[4] ^ keys[1];
	dval[3] = dbytes[2] ^ keys[7];
	dval[4] = dbytes[6] ^ keys[2];
	dval[5] = dbytes[3] ^ keys[4];
	dval[6] = dbytes[0] ^ keys[0];
	dval[7] = dbytes[1] ^ keys[6];
	return(0);
}
Exercise:
Write a program to decrypt any file encrypted with Flexcrypt 5.11.

Other notes

Some of the code which seems wasteful of cycles is to deal with big endian/little endian issues.

Only limited testing was done. It is possible that there are conditions which could yield incorrect results.

Utilities

This code writes a file for chosen plaintext attacks. It isn't really part of this project, it is provided only for convenience and for verification.

#include<stdio.h>
#include<fcntl.h>
#include<unistd.h>
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
	int fd;
	unsigned long data[4];
	int i;
	data[0] = 0x00000001;
	data[1] = 0x00000010;
	data[2] = 0x00000200;
	data[3] = 0x00000400;
	if (argc != 2) {
		fprintf(stderr, "Usage: wrdata file\n");
		exit(1);
	}
	if ((fd = open(argv[1], O_RDWR|O_CREAT, 0755)) < 0) {
		fprintf (stderr, "Failed open of %s\n", argv[1]);
		perror("open");
		exit(1);
	}
	for (i = 0; i < 1; i++) {
	  if (write(fd,(void *) data, 16) != 16) {
		fprintf (stderr, "Failed writing block %d to %s\n", i, argv[1]);
		perror("write");
		exit(1);
		 }
	}
	close(fd);
	printf ("Done.\n");
}

Other notes

Version 6.1 of Flexcrypt uses the SAME algorithms, however the keys required for decrypt are different. The real keys used to encrypt the file are the same though.



Ob Duh

I wont even bother explaining you that you should BUY programs if you intend to use them for a longer period than the allowed one. Should you want to STEAL software instead (unlikely in this case :-) you don't need to crack protection schemes at all: you'll find everything on most Warez sites, complete and already regged, farewell, don't come back.

You are deep inside fravia's page of reverse engineering, choose your way out:


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