Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Yes, but if they have their crypto stuff together, it might not gain you much.

Someone here mentioned the encrypted versions of the files are the original size + a little extra. To me that indicates that they use a public key (of which the private component does not reside on your computer, and never has, but which you can buy). The public key is used to encrypt a key for a symmetric algorithm (AES, DES, ...), which encrypts the data, and the RSA-encrypted version of that symmetric key is then prepended as a header of some sorts.

So using a debugger you'd be able to see the public key, which I suppose is infected-useraccount-specific. It's not useful for decryption, you'll need its private counterpart.

You'll also see the symmetric key, of which a new (random) one should be instantiated for each file that is being encrypted. Should, but might not... if they slipped up, the latter might be reused (for your user account). In which case you can win, if you can observe it encrypting a new file — you'd be able to decrypt the other files too.

They'd have to be quite stupid to slip up like this, but it happens.

Update: Reading a reverse engineering report¹ it appears that it indeed works as described above. And yes, they didn't slip up; a new symmetric key is generated for each individual file.

¹ http://www.kernelmode.info/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=2945



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: