2009-02-26

Bruteforceme#1_astigmata

[difficulty: 2] [protection: the RCR instruction :)]

A machine has been dedicated to searching for the key to Bruteforceme#1_astigmata, a crackme which has stood unsolved for quite a while now. (LINK: Bruteforceme#1_astigmata). What's so neat about the crackme is that there are really only four instructions that make it so difficult. Those instructions are iterated 1E8 times. RCR has no 1:1 inverse, but it is invertible. The branching factor, moving backwards, is so large that any attempt to go back more than 100 iterations becomes infeasible. It is also not difficult to find (eax,ebx) pairs that lead to a solution by just allowing the loop to run unbounded, and stopping when the xor result is 0xD5446474 (keep a 1E8 history). So back to brute force. My biggest fear is that no answer exists. I'm confident that the search is correct because I compared some outputs with outputs of the crackme. Some inputs were also chosen, ran them through the crackme to get the xor result, and then the search was tested to see if it could really find the chosen input.



UPDATE!
After nearly 9 days of searching, on Christmas eve morning (2008), the serial was found :) See the solution in the crackme solutions download link or on crackmes.de.

1 comment:

thanks for commenting!