Out of context, but I couldn´t resist.<p>"Matasano" is one of my favorite words in Spanish, not for its meaning, but for how it sounds. Anyway, here is the meaning:<p>mata=kill<p>sano=healthy<p>So, literally it means to "kill the healthy" and it is used to refer to doctors, usually in colloquially, rather than pejorative, terms.<p>Sorry for the interlude.
Also by Matasano, and tons of fun: <a href="https://microcorruption.com" rel="nofollow">https://microcorruption.com</a><p>In-browser reverse engineering game.
Incredibly good news! I emailed earlier this year and got no response, and I was afraid the whole thing had gone away. It's like Christmas in August!
A good complement to this set of challenges is Dan Boneh's Crypto class on Coursera. The coursera class is more theory-driven, whereas these challenges are more practical... they mix well. <a href="https://www.coursera.org/course/crypto" rel="nofollow">https://www.coursera.org/course/crypto</a>
Glad to see that this was not dropped! I did notice that matasano.com/articles/crypto-challenges/ has been returning a 404 for the past month or two.<p>Will there be a way to automatically submit / advance, for those of us that would like to do them without encountering spoilers?
I'm stuck on set 1 challenge 4, detecting single-character XOR. I know how the cipher works, having solved challenge 3, but when I brute-forced all 327 hex strings in their challenge data with each of the 256 possible one-byte keys, none of them deciphered to anything like English. I suspect a typo in their data, since one line -- 1c3df1135321a8e9241a5607f8305d571aa546001e3254555a11511924 -- actually has 58 hex digits, not 60. Has anyone else run into this problem?<p>Edit: Of course I would solve this right after a post saying I can't. I was only looking at the (string, key) pairs which deciphered to all-printable plain text, but forgot that \r, \n, and \t count as printable ASCII characters.
What textbook would be recommended for someone wanting not only to accept the challenge, but also to get some theory under their belt at the same time?
I only did the first two, which I hear are pretty trivial in comparison to the later ones, but I still had a great time and learned a hell of a lot in the process. Definitely highly recommended even if it's just for fun or out of idle curiosity, and no prior knowledge required. Looking forward to reading some 'proper' solutions now...
I'll probably always regret not getting further into these than I did (life intruded, and then the psychic debt of being late disincentivised me from returning to them). One of these days I really do intend to finish 'em.<p>Thanks for crafting them, and thanks for posing them. Hopefully you guys got some great new hires out of it!
On <a href="http://cryptopals.com/sets/4/challenges/31" rel="nofollow">http://cryptopals.com/sets/4/challenges/31</a> , I'd just make it return the offset of the first byte that don't match to simulate the information that a timing leak would reveal.
404 on <a href="http://cryptopals.com/sets/1/challenges/1/python" rel="nofollow">http://cryptopals.com/sets/1/challenges/1/python</a>