draft

Justfile

@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+serve:
+    hugo serve --buildDrafts

assets/sass/_content.scss

@@ -94,9 +94,18 @@ pre > code {
     font-size: 0.9em;
 }
 
+.toc {
+    background-color: lighten($background-color, 10%);
+    padding: 20px;
+
+    ul {
+        margin-block: 0;
+        margin-bottom: 0;
+    }
+}
+
 .post-content {
     > p {
         line-height: 1.5;
-        margin-bottom: 1.75em;
     }
 }

config.toml

@@ -2,3 +2,8 @@ baseURL = "http://example.org/"
 languageCode = "en-us"
 title = "michael's blog"
 enableGitInfo = true
+
+[markup.tableOfContents]
+endLevel = 4
+ordered = true
+startLevel = 2

content/posts/2018-10-26-twenty-years-of-rsa-attacks.md

@@ -1,21 +1,19 @@
 +++
 title = "twenty years of attacks on rsa with examples"
 date = 2018-10-26
+toc = true
 
 [taxonomies]
 tags = ["math", "crypto", "python"]
-
-[extra]
-toc = true
 +++
 
-# 1. introduction
+## 1. introduction
 
 There's [this great paper][1] by Dan Boneh from 1998 about the RSA cryptosystem and its weaknesses. I found this paper to be a particularly interesting read (and interestingly enough, it's been 20 years since that paper!), so here I'm going to reiterate some of the attacks described in the paper, but using examples with numbers in them. (Also please excuse the lack of proper formatting, I've yet to figure out how to get Gutenberg to accept Latex)
 
 That being said, I _am_ going to skip over the primer of how the RSA cryptosystem works, since there's already a great number of resources on how to do that.
 
-## 1.1 factoring large integers
+### 1.1 factoring large integers
 
 Obviously this is a pretty bruteforce-ish way to crack the cryptosystem, and probably won't work in time for you to see the result, but can still be considered an attack vector. This trick works by just factoring the modulus, N. With N, finding the private exponent d from the public exponent e is a piece of cake.
 
@@ -47,11 +45,11 @@ Now all that's left is to discover the private exponent and solve for the origin
 
 And that's it! Now let's look at some more sophisticated attacks...
 
-# 2. elementary attacks
+## 2. elementary attacks
 
 These attacks are related to the _misuse_ of the RSA system. (if you can't tell, I'm mirroring the document structure of the original paper)
 
-## 2.1 common modulus
+### 2.1 common modulus
 
 My cryptography professor gave this example as well. Suppose there was a setup in which the modulus was reused, maybe for convenience (although I suppose with libraries today, it'd actually be more _inconvenient_ to reuse the key). Key pairs would be issued to different users and they would share public keys with each other and keep private keys to themselves.
 
@@ -117,7 +115,7 @@ True
 
 We've successfully recovered `p` and `q` from just `N`, `e`, and `d`!
 
-## 2.2 blinding
+### 2.2 blinding
 
 This attack is actually about RSA _signatures_ (which uses the opposite keys as encryption: private for signing and public for verifying), and shows how you can compute the signature of a message M using the signature of a derived message M'.
 

content/posts/2021-07-05-https-request-from-scratch.md

@@ -0,0 +1,157 @@
++++
+title = "sending an https request from scratch"
+date = 2021-07-05
+draft = true
+toc = true
+
+[taxonomies]
+tags = ["computers", "web"]
++++
+
+The web is [so complicated][4] these days, I began wondering exactly how big of a feat it would be to formally verify everything. At this point I realized all I knew about web protocols were from fiddling around with HTTP 1.0 request from doing CTFs in the past. You'd pop open a socket to wherever you wanted, stick `GET` and then whatever path you wanted, and then add a version number at the end.
+
+The modern web's changed significantly since those days, so I thought it would be an interesting undertaking to see exactly how much it would take to send an HTTPS request from scratch, just like what the browser does, using as little as I can.
+
+> **Disclaimer:** Don't use this code for any real software.
+
+I'll be using Python for this since it's just for fun, the code will be pretty concise, and I don't have to write boilerplate outside of this post in order to make the code in it work. In fact, I wrote a [small utility][3] to extract the code blocks out of markdown files, and it should produce working example for this file.
+
+Since we're imitating a browser, let's say we're going to connect to Wikipedia, by typing `wikipedia.org` in the address bar. First up, URL parsing.
+
+## URL Parsing
+
+This part is basically just a chore. URLs are defined in [RFC 3986][1], but we'll cheat a bit and just get the important parts we want for sending a request. First, I'll write out a regex for actually matching the parts we want:
+
+```py
+import re
+URL_PAT = re.compile(r"""
+    (?P<scheme>[A-Za-z]+)       # scheme (http, https,...)
+    ://                         # divider
+    (?P<host>[A-Za-z\-\.]+)     # hostname
+    (:(?P<port>[0-9]+))?        # port
+    (/                          # divider
+        (?P<path>[^?]*))?       # path
+""", flags = re.VERBOSE)
+```
+
+We'll say if a string doesn't match this regex, then we won't count it as a URL. The rest of this part is just writing some glue code turning this regex into a dictionary:
+
+```py
+def parse_url(s: str):
+    m = URL_PAT.match(s)
+    if m is None: raise Exception("bad url")
+    return m.groupdict()
+u = parse_url("https://en.wikipedia.org")
+# {'scheme': 'https', 'host': 'en.wikipedia.org', 'port': None, 'path': None}
+```
+
+## TLS
+
+OK, now that we know where we're going to send the request, we should actually open a socket and talk to it. But before we want to send any data, we should _encrypt_ our communications. TLS is a protocol that conducts a brief handshake, then creates a tunnel where we can send data freely and it will be transparently encrypted before it goes over the wire. I haven't seen many example implementations of TLS out there (probably for a good reason), but without looking at actual code that works, it's hard to say I fully understand the protocol. So here I'll implement TLS 1.3 (defined in [RFC 8446][2]).
+
+- Worth noting here that TLS uses big-endian format for numbers.
+
+> **Second disclaimer:** hope I made it clear above but **THIS IS A TOY PROGRAM**. If you're rolling your own crypto for a program people will be depending on (don't) then get it audited by a cryptographer or your code _will_ be broken.
+
+### Record Layer
+
+TLS messages are sent in records, on top of TCP packets. This middle layer has its own header, described in section 5.1 of the RFC.
+
+Not a big deal, it just means we'll want a helper function to actually send our packets through this record over the socket. The implementation is short, and looks pretty much exactly like the definition:
+
+```py
+import struct
+def wrap_tls_record(ctype, rdata):
+    data = bytes()
+    data += struct.pack(">B", ctype) # content type encoded as a single byte
+    data += b"\x03\x03" # legacy_record_version, should just be 0x0303
+    data += struct.pack(">H", len(rdata)) # length of the data
+    data += rdata # finally, the record data itself
+    return data
+```
+
+### Handshake Layer
+
+But before we can send the first message, we also have to write some glue code for the handshake layer! This layer describes all handshake messages, and can be found in appendix B.3 of the RFC.
+
+Again, not too much code, just needs to be there. The annoying part of this is that the length is actually described with a `uint24`, which means it takes 3 bytes. Python's `struct` module doesn't actually have anything for this, so I'm just going to use the 4-byte unsigned option and chop off the last byte.
+
+```py
+import struct
+def wrap_handshake(htype, hdata):
+    data = bytes()
+    data += struct.pack(">B", htype) # handshake type encoded as a byte
+    data += struct.pack(">I", len(hdata))[1:] # length, encoded as 3 bytes!
+    data += hdata # and then the handshake data
+    return data
+```
+
+### Client Hello
+
+TLS starts with the client sending a `ClientHello` message (defined in section 4.1.2 of the RFC), which basically starts the handshake off with some basic details about what the client can do. Now's probably a good time to decide on some basics, like which ciphers we'll be using to communicate.
+
+#### Cipher Suite
+
+In reality, encryption is mostly done at the hardware level, so browsers choose this based on what algorithms your hardware is fastest at. I pointed Firefox at Wikipedia and peeked into the connection details and it looks like I'm using AES-256-GCM with SHA-384, so I'll go with that. Let's see what number we should be using to indicate that.
+
+```
+This specification defines the following cipher suites for use with
+TLS 1.3.
+
++------------------------------+-------------+
+| Description                  | Value       |
++------------------------------+-------------+
+| TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256       | {0x13,0x01} |
+| TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384       | {0x13,0x02} | <-- this one
+| TLS_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256 | {0x13,0x03} |
+| TLS_AES_128_CCM_SHA256       | {0x13,0x04} |
+| TLS_AES_128_CCM_8_SHA256     | {0x13,0x05} |
++------------------------------+-------------+
+```
+
+Cool, this means the two numbers `0x13` and `0x02` correspond to the cipher suite we want to use.
+
+#### Extensions
+
+Ridiculously enough, it seems that TLS1.3 keeps a lot of pre-1.3 fields in there, renaming them `legacy_`, and then putting new features in extensions. This may help forward compatibility, but also means that some extensions end up not being extensions at all, but required components of the protocol. (I suppose this helps them phase out certain headers in later updates without changing the general layout)
+
+The extensions we'll need to support are listed in section 9.2 of the RFC. We'll only be sending the ones required during a `ClientHello`:
+
+- supported_versions (required)
+- signature_algorithms (required)
+- signature_algorithms_cert (required)
+- supported_groups (required)
+- key_share (required)
+- server_name (required)
+
+What this means for our implementation is that for each of these we'll have to send a bit of information in the `ClientHello`. That's not too big of a deal; let's go through them one-by-one.
+
+```py
+import struct
+def client_hello_extensions():
+    data = bytes()
+    # ...continued below
+```
+
+Supported versions is just what TLS1.3 replaced the version header with; rather than saying up front that I want TLS 1.2, we have a general TLS framework for specifying extensions and then if I want to let the server know I can speak both TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3, I'd put both versions into this extension.
+
+```py
+    # ...continued from above
+    supported_versions = (b"\x02" # the length
+        + b"\x03\x04") # TLS 1.3
+    data += struct.pack(">H", len(supported_versions)) + supported_versions
+    # ...continued below
+```
+
+
+
+## HTTP 2
+
+## Conclusion
+
+What did we learn? Don't do this shit yourself, it's not worth it.
+
+[1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986
+[2]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8446
+[3]: https://git.mzhang.io/michael/markout
+[4]: https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html

layouts/posts/single.html

@@ -9,6 +9,15 @@
     - {{ .ReadingTime }} min read
 </small>
 
+{{ if .Params.toc }}
+<div class="toc">
+    <details>
+        <summary>Table of Contents</summary>
+        {{ .TableOfContents }}
+    </details>
+</div>
+{{ end }}
+
 <div id="content" class="post-content">{{ .Content }}</div>
 
 <hr />