Difference in PHP encryption from iOS and .NET

Question

I have an issue when communicating encrypted between iOS and PHP. I have an app that encrypts a string and sends it to a PHP server that decrypts it. That part works just fine. Now the PHP server needs to send an encrypted response back to the app, which seems to be causing a bit more gray hair.

The issue is, that when I encrypt a string in PHP it looks different from the same string encrypted in iOS and even .NET - obviously all places use the same algorithm, key and IV.

I use Rijndael 128 in CBC mode with an IV consisting of empty bytes (so far).

The PHP encryption looks so:

$encrypted = mcrypt_encrypt( MCRYPT_RIJNDAEL_128, $this->secret_key, $str, MCRYPT_MODE_CBC, $this->iv );
$encrypted = base64_encode( $encrypted );

The iOS encryption is attached in this file:

StringEncryption.m: http://pastie.org/1365766

I hope someone can help me spot where I'm missing something or have some different parameters of values. I have looked at this for several hours, and can't find anything else to try.

Here's a link to how I use the StringEncryption.m http://pastie.org/1365771 — mgj, Dec 10 '10 at 17:35
And my .NET equivalent: http://pastie.org/1365765 (Sorry, can't have more than one link per post...) — mgj, Dec 10 '10 at 17:35
I don't think it's encoding - have tried changing everything to both ascii and utf8. — mgj, Dec 10 '10 at 17:36

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:55

Most likely it's a padding issue... Please see here or here for more information.

EDIT after OP comment:

PHP has no built-in support for other padding modes than the NULL-padding. At least .Net allows you to specify NULL-padding (I think), the other option would be to implement PKCS#7-padding in PHP which is not that difficult to do.

Pad the input with a padding string of between 1 and 8 bytes to make the total length an exact multiple of 8 bytes. The value of each byte of the padding string is set to the number of bytes added - i.e. 8 bytes of value 0x08, 7 bytes of value 0x07, ..., 2 bytes of 0x02, or one byte of value 0x01.

$blockSize = mcrypt_get_block_size(MCRYPT_RIJNDAEL_128, MCRYPT_MODE_CBC);
$padding   = $blockSize - (strlen($data) % $blockSize);
$data      .= str_repeat(chr($padding), $padding);

That sounds promising. Question is how I specify padding with mcrypt? Can't find it in the documentation anywhere - it seems more explicit in .NET and objective-c — mgj, Dec 10 '10 at 17:52
Yep, that was just what I was missing. I had a feeling there was some padding involved. Thanks! — mgj, Dec 14 '10 at 12:23

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Oct 09 '12 at 12:17

After long test's I think this encrypt method will be right for tests:

function mc_encrypt($str = "Affe", $key = "12345678901234567890123456789012")
{
    $str = "Affe";
  $block = mcrypt_get_block_size('rijndael-256', 'cbc');
    $pad = $block - (strlen($str) % $block);
    $str .= str_repeat(chr($pad), $pad);

    $encoded =  base64_encode(mcrypt_encrypt('rijndael-256', $key, $str, 'cbc',$key));
    file_put_contents("test.txt",$encoded);
    return $encoded;
}

I got this on iOS: v+cB4woDYANTozUbOgxJ4rWKb59EfLf6NkRE/Ee0kYY= But if I try to decrypt (see above), I got (null)

On the Other if I encrypt on iOS, I got this one: UUfn34iyNlSK40VaehloaQ==

definitely to short (or the other is to long)...searching again for errors.

Difference in PHP encryption from iOS and .NET

2 Answers2

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