Take Assessment: Exercise 1: Decoding Lab

Take Assessment: Exercise 1: Decoding Lab 实验分析

实验参考资料：

• http://blog.youkuaiyun.com/pngfiwang/article/details/49644501
• http://qianjigui.iteye.com/blog/256678

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实验题目

Decoding Lab: Understanding a Secret Message

  You have just intercepted an encoded message. The message is a sequence of bits which reads as follows in hexadecimal:

6363636363636363724646636F6D6F72 466D203A65693A7243646E206F54540A 5920453A54756F0A6F6F470A21643A6F 594E2020206F776F797275744563200A 6F786F686E6963736C206765796C656B 2C3365737420346E20216F74726F5966 7565636F202061206C61676374206C6F 20206F74747865656561727632727463 6E617920680A64746F69766120646E69 21687467630020656C6C786178742078 6578206F727478787863617800783174

  You have no idea how to decode it, but you know that your grade depends on it, so you are willing to do anything to extract the message. Fortunately, one of your many agents on the field has stolen the source code for the decoder. This agent (007) has put the code and the message in the file secret.cpp, which you can download from the laboratory of your technical staff (Q).

  Q has noticed that the decoder takes four integers as arguments. Executing the decoder with various arguments seems to either crash the program or produce unintelligible output. It seems that the correct four integers have to be chosen in order for the program to produce the decoded message. These four integers are the “secret keys.”

  007 has been unable to find the keys, but from the desk of the encrypting personnel he was able to cunningly retrieve the first five characters of the unencoded message. These characters are:
From:

Assignment

  Your assignment is to decode the message, and find the keys. Reminders This exercise is not extremely difficult. However, the strategy of trying things until something works will be ineffective. Try to understand the material in the course, particularly the following:

• Memory contains nothing but bits. Bits are interpreted as integers, characters, or instructions by the compiler, but they have no intrinsic type in memory.
• The compiler can be strong-armed into interpreting integers as characters, or even as instructions, and vice versa.
• A pointer in C is merely a stored memory address.
• The activation records for each function call are all together in memory, and they are organized in a stack that grows downwards and shrinks upwards on function calls and returns respectively.

Strategy

  The designers of this decoder weren’t very good. They made it possible for us to attack the keys in two independent parts. Try to break the first two keys first, and do not try to break the third and fourth keys until you have succeeded with the first two.

  You can do the first part by specifying only two integer arguments when you execute the decoder. If you get the first and second keys right, a message that starts with From: will appear. This message is not the true message, but a decoy. It is useful, however, to let you know that you have indeed broken the first two keys.

  In breaking the first two keys, realize that the function process_keys12 must be somehow changing the value of the dummy variable. This must be so, because the variables start and stride control the extraction of the message, and they are calculated from the value of dummy.

  In breaking the third and fourth keys, try to get the code to invoke extract_message2 instead of extract_message1. This modification must somehow be controlled from within the function process_keys34.

Files

  When you are done, write a brief report that includes at least the following:

1. The secret message.
2. The secret keys.
3. One paragraph describing, in your own prose, what process_keys12 does. For example, you might say that it modifies a specific program variable.
4. The meaning of the first two keys in terms of variables and addresses in the decoder program. For example, you might describe key2 by saying that its X-Y bits contain the valu