Radioactive was a crypto challenge that executed arbitrary python code, if you could apply a correct cryptographic tag. Source was provided, and the handler is below:

#!python
class RadioactiveHandler(SocketServer.BaseRequestHandler):
  def handle(self):
    key = open("secret", "rb").read()
    cipher = AES.new(key, AES.MODE_ECB)

    self.request.send("Waiting for command:\n")
    tag, command = self.request.recv(1024).strip().split(':')
    command = binascii.a2b_base64(command)
    pad = "\x00" * (16 - (len(command) % 16))
    command += pad

    blocks = [command[x:x+16] for x in xrange(0, len(command), 16)]
    cts = [str_to_bytes(cipher.encrypt(block)) for block in blocks]
    for block in cts:
      print ''.join(chr(x) for x in block).encode('hex')

    command = command[:-len(pad)]

    t = reduce(lambda x, y: [xx^yy for xx, yy in zip(x, y)], cts)
    t = ''.join([chr(x) for x in t]).encode('hex')

    match = True
    print tag, t
    for i, j in zip(tag, t):
      if i != j:
        match = False

    del key
    del cipher

    if not match:
      self.request.send("Checks failed!\n")
    eval(compile(command, "script", "exec"))

    return

So, it looks for a tag:command pair, where the tag is hex-encoded and the command is base64 encode. The command must be valid python, passed through compile and eval, so you’ll need to send a response back to yourself via self.request.send.

So how’s the tag calculated? Every 16-byte block of the command is encrypted in AES-ECB mode (so, two identical plaintexts == two identical ciphertexts) and then the encrypted blocks are xored together, producing the final tag. My first thought was to generate a plaintext such that len(plain) % 16 == 0, then repeat it twice, so the XORs will cancel out and give a tag of 00…00. Unfortunately, the padding must be at least one byte long, and my plaintext cannot contain null bytes.

So, we were also provided some sample code. One such example, decoded from its base64 representation, turns out to be:

#!python
import os

self.request.send("Send command to eval: \n")
cmd = self.request.recv(1024).strip()


good = True
for b in cmd:
	if b not in '0123456789+-=/%^* ()':
		good = False

if good:
	self.request.send(str(eval(cmd)) + "\n")
else:
	self.request.send("???\n")

It turns out the line good = False (and two trailing newlines) are their own 16-byte block. We can append “good = True \n\n” to reset the value of true, and append it a 2nd time to get our tag to come out correctly. Then we can simply provide self.request.send(open('key').read()) when we receive our “Send command to eval:” prompt. And this got our flag, but it turns out there are two simpler solutions.

Alternate solution 1

Provide your own code as a multiple of 16. Provide it again. This gives you a tag of 00…00. But we know this doesn’t work. So instead, append one of the code samples provided, and use the tag for that, as 0{16} ^ known_tag = known_tag.

Alternate solution 2

Start your input with : followed by whatever base-64 encoded code you want. If you provide no tag at all, then the loop for tag comparison is never checked, leaving match=True. (This was probably an accident in the design of the problem, possibly inteding to provide constant-time tag comparison. As a side note, that tag comparison is not even constant time, even for strings of the proper length.)