AESCrypt decryption between iOS and PHP

Question

I am having a heck of a time figuring out how to decrypt a string encrypted with the NSData+AESCrypt.m (Explained here)

I have been looking at a handful of other threads, but I only need the iDevice to send a string to a PHP file encrypted, and then it gets decrypted inside PHP (where it gets stored into a database).

This code :

NSString *encryptedString = [@"Hello" AES256EncryptWithKey:@"a16byteslongkey!"];
NSLog(@"The strign encrypted : %@",encryptedString);

Returns the string encrypted : 7opqbb7sEVNoXplyQv/X8g==

And here is my PHP code for decryption:

function decrypt_data($data, $key) {
    return mcrypt_decrypt(MCRYPT_RIJNDAEL_256, $key,$data,MCRYPT_MODE_ECB);
}

function unpadPKCS7($data, $blockSize) {
    $length = strlen ( $data );
    if ($length > 0) {
        $first = substr ( $data, - 1 );

        if (ord ( $first ) <= $blockSize) {
            for($i = $length - 2; $i > 0; $i --)
                if (ord ( $data [$i] != $first ))
                    break;

            return substr ( $data, 0, $i );
        }
    }
    return $data;
}

function decrypt_string($string) {
    $string = unpadPKCS7($string,128);
    $string = decrypt_data($string,"a16byteslongkey!");
    return $string;
}
die('<br>Basic :'.decrypt_string('7opqbb7sEVNoXplyQv/X8g=='));

UPDATE:

Been doing some MD5 decryption and experimenting a lot, but still far from achieving usable results. This is what I got so far:

Original string : Hello
AES256Encrypt result : 7opqbb7sEVNoXplyQv/X8
base64_decode Decrypted: îŠjm¾ìSh^™rBÿ×
mcrypt_rijndael_128 : Õ¯Öå«Ž(ás2’'u)
mcrypt_rijndael_128 & hex2bin : UÃ)ı+úy´e

Sadly, no matter how I bend and twist this, I just get jibberish. Can anyone see what I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

Disclaimer: I have zero iPhone development experience.

Short answer - what tc. said. Something is horribly wrong with the AES256EncryptWithKey:

Being AES256 you would expect it to require a 32 byte key, not a 16 byte key. But OK, say it pads shorter keys with null bytes to make them 32 bytes. This might explain why your 16 byte key is being padded with 16 null characters.

But, when it comes to the actual act of encryption, it's using AES 128, but with the 32 byte key. Say wha?

Converting tc.'s Python to PHP:

$base64encoded_ciphertext = '7opqbb7sEVNoXplyQv/X8g==';
$key = 'a16byteslongkey!';

$padded_key = $key . str_repeat(chr(0x00), 16); // Argh!

$result = mcrypt_decrypt(MCRYPT_RIJNDAEL_128, $padded_key, base64_decode($base64encoded_ciphertext), 'ecb');

// Yetch - $result ends up being padded with 0x0b's (vertical tab).
var_dump(rtrim($result, chr(0x0b)));

Result:

string(5) "Hello"

~~

Edit: This post from Henno has some relevant details.

~~

Did some additional research. The null padding on your key is likely because AES256 requires a 32 byte key. The 0x0B padding on the plaintext is thanks to PKCS7. PKCS7 is a padding scheme where the byte used for padding is equal in value to the number of bytes added. In this example, 11 bytes were added to the end of 'Hello' turning your 5 byte input into a 16 byte block for AES. 11 = 0x0B.

Thus, the code above will not work when the plaintext is not length = 5. Try the following instead:

$pad_char = ord(substr($result, -1));
$result_without_padding = substr($result, 0, strlen($result) - $pad_char);

Answer 2

The encrypted string looks like it's been base64 encoded. Try decoding it before you decrypt it.

Answer 3

First off, the Objective-C code you're using is pretty terrible:

• The keyspace is severely limited (presumably UTF-8 bytes terminated by a null byte, extended with null bytes to 32 bytes). The easiest way to generate a random key is to stick to ASCII, which limits you to about 223.6 bits for the default key size of 256 bits.
• Encryption is done in ECB mode.
• Data appears to be irreversibly padded with 0x0B.

Avoid it at all costs. It is not secure.

It can be "decrypted" in Python with something like this:

>>> import Crypto.Cipher.AES
>>> import base64
>>> Crypto.Cipher.AES.new('a16byteslongkey!'+'\0'*16).decrypt(base64.b64decode('7opqbb7sEVNoXplyQv/X8g=='))
'Hello\x0b\x0b\x0b\x0b\x0b\x0b\x0b\x0b\x0b\x0b\x0b'

Answer 4

see my post here: PHP iOS AES Encryption

---

I just got through this same sort of project. I used the library you referenced in "also considered..."

Here is some example code to decrypt with php:

$iv2 = '';
for($i=0;$i<16;$i++){
    $iv2 .= "\0";   
}
$plain_text_CBC = mcrypt_decrypt(MCRYPT_RIJNDAEL_128, $key, $encrypted_text, MCRYPT_MODE_CBC, $iv2);
var_dump($plain_text_CBC);

Make sure your keys are both 256-bit (32 characters, I have not yet had any encoding issues, but if you do, remember that you are encrypting bytes, not characters). Note that 128 in MCRYPT_RIJNDAEL_128 is the block size and not the key size, while in the method AES256DecryptWithKey, 256 is a reference to the key size, while the block size is 128. AES256DecryptWithKey runs in CBC mode, but has a null initialization vector (iv).

CBC means that each block depends on the last block, and so it uses a pre-set, usually random, "block -1" called the IV

ECB means that each block is encrypted in the same way, hence it reveals when two blocks in the same message are the same. The library mentioned does not use it, so I mentioned it just for contrast.

The use of a zero iv (0000000000000000 in bytes) is considered insecure, but it does provide you with some additional security (but one might still be able to tell if the fist 16 characters of your plain text were the same each time). To fix this you would have to create an NSData *iv variable for the IV and modify the CCcrypt argument of NSData+AESCrypt.m to add [iv bytes] for the iv parameter (I have not yet tested this code), and you would need to store this iv and pass it to the php along with you message. But first I would test and have everything working with a zero iv.