py-basic/Tasks.md

Tasks for beginners

This document contains some tasks for Python beginners. It does not aim to teach general programming techniques, only how to use Python. I try to avoid unrealistic tasks.

In case you have somehow gotten this document from another source, this is the original source, where the links should hopefully work. If something does not work feel free to contact me at software@cscherr.de.

MD5 Hashchecker

A. Produce a single MD5 Hash

Difficulty: 1/5

1. Hash the string foobar19 with the MD5 hashing algorithm.

Hints

• Use Pythons hashlib.
• Your hashing function does not take strings for input, only raw data (bytes).
• You need to explicitly tell your hash to actually process the input.
• When printing your results, the result may be interpreted as data for characters. You want the numeric value of the result in Hexadecimal.

Solution

The MD5 hash of foobar19 is fa5c65d5438f849387d3fdda2be4dd65.

Example Code

B. Hash multiple values and search for specific ones.

Difficulty: 2/5

1. Find a way to produce strings with the basis foobar with appended numbers from 000000 to 999999.

1.      `foobar000000`
2.      `foobar000001`
3.      `foobar000002`
        ...
999998. `foobar999998`
999999. `foobar999999`

2. Hash all these with the MD5 hashing algorithm.
3. Find the exact numbers, how many of these hashes start with 00
4. Bonus:
   1. If MD5 was a good / perfect Hashing algorithm (it is definitely not), how many matches for a 00 prefix should exist? Why?
   2. How many matches for 0 to 50000? How many matches for 0 to 50.000.000?

Testvectors

Last 5 Matches

999384 | 009671fd23fa783df1fff63516e5d115
999751 | 00ec2ade58f75c44b7300294497f7fb1
999844 | 009cfd7949b577a3311d9db3ee49c15d
999852 | 006fe04f7d3f710f93d3e6324506154a
999902 | 00c063364ddffa1bdf338dfcf0319424

Hints

• Use a for loop to do the thing X times
• Use Pythons string formatting to put the numbers and string together
• Use Options for the %d Placeholder to get 0 to be displayed as 000000
• After hashing, check if your current hash matches the search. Print it if that is the case to see if the match is a false positive.
• Increment a number on each match. The value of that number after the loop is how many Hashes start with 00 for this task.

Solution

There are 3889 hashes for foobar000000 to foobar999999 that produce an MD5 Hash that starts with 00.

Code Example

Bonus We want N/16^2 occurrences for an ideal hashing algorithm, where N is the maximum of our range + 1.

16^2 comes from 2 characters in a range of 0 to e (Hexadecimal).

We want the hashing algorithm to spread out as much as possible, no value should be more common than any other value. This is essential for the security of the hashing algorithm.

Value	Ideal Occurences
1.000.000	\approx 3906
500.000	\approx 1953
50.000.000	\approx 195312

C. Find earliest hash that fits criteria

Difficulty: 2/5

1. Find the earliest integer X for foobarXXXXXX (where X is an iterator as in the last subtask) that produces an MD5 hash that starts with 2718.

Hints

• You can reuse most code from the last subtask.
• Match against the new prefix, but stop when you find it.
• Display the index number in each loop iteration.

Solution

The first hash with prefix 2718 occurs at i=70559.

070559 | 2718e5ee6d05091ce6dad023e55ee19c

Code Example

Super basic web server

Difficulty: 3/5

1. Program a Python web server that writes "Python is not so hard" in your Browser (or in cURL). Use http.server.

Hints

• Use http.server.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler and io.BytesIO.
• Define your own class that inherits SimpleHTTPRequestHandler.
• You don't need to implement do_GET().
• Implement your own send_head() method. This is the method that writes your response (not completely on it's own, but unless you feel like inspecting standard libraries, just do what I'm saying.).
• send_head() should take no arguments (other than self) and return some readable buffer.
• Don't forget to set the headers for HTTP before sending the body.
• Your OS might block hosting to ports < 1000. Try to host your web server to localhost:8080.

Solution

Take a look at the provided Code Example.

Code Example

Random Password generator

Difficulty: 2/5

1. Generate a string of 16 random alphanumeric characters.
2. When starting your script, take a number for a CLI Argument. Generate a random string of this length.
3. Bonus
   • How many possible strings consisting of 16 alphanumeric characters can exist?
   • Add the possibility for a second argument -v that indicates your script should be more verbose.
   • print the security bits (log_2(L) where L is the total number of possibilites) when the -v flag is applied

Example:

$ python ./randomString.py 60
n51uxDLu3BnxZ1D00gYKYRcG2jh1Y6uulHgrJ0TK3w5FtWl6wm8U0azNtxw0
# ^^^^ the above is 60 characters ^^^^

Hints

• Use random.choice to generate a random character
• build your own alphabet string
• Use sys.argv to access the CLI Arguments

Solution

Take a look at the provided Code Example.

Code Example

Bonus

There are 62 alphanumeric characters (A-Z), (a-z), (0-9).

With N characters, there are 62^N possible variants. For N=16 that's 62^{16} = 47.672.401.706.823.533.450.263.330.816 possible variants.

Security people measure security in Bits ($2^x$). You can calculate the bits of security with the logarithm base 2.

S = log_2(62^N).

We can immediately see that longer passwords are exponentially more secure than more complex passwords (passwords that make use of complicated characters). For each bit, the security of the password is doubled.

For our example of N=16 we can calculate the security of the password like this:

S=log_2(62^{16}) \approx 95.27

That number of security bits is pretty good for passwords. However it does not cost you anything to just make your passwords longer than that, and give attackers no chance to break them by brute force.