TL;DR

Coding AES is doable.

As it’s probably clear by now, I’m going through the Cryptopals challenges and Challenge 7 introduces us to AES. It suggests to

use OpenSSL::Cipher and give it AES-128-ECB as the cipher.

Fact is that OpenSSL::Cipher does not exist in Perl. I can only guess that its closest cousin might be SSLeay, which is not exactly user friendly. If you want to go with a module in Perl, I’d suggest to go for CryptX and in particular look for Crypt::Mode::ECB.

Anyway, one of the good things about Cryptopals is to look below the blanket and see how things work. So… why not?

The FIPS PUB 197 standard introduces (or, better, announces) the Advanced Encryption Standard. The standard itself is… readable, in the sense that it is relatively easy to read and the functions are relatively easy to code. So… why not?

This means that, after A toy RSA implementation, let’s venture into implementing A toy AES implementation (in Perl) for fun and profit. Well, in the sense that we will be profiting from the experience and possibly reuse the code in one or two Cryptopals challenges.

We’re only aiming for correctness here. The code will be at most useful for better understanding of the operations and possibly for doing some of the challenges in Cryptopals, but it’s going to stab you in the back if you use it beyond this point. A toy is still a toy.

This is no joke. Using this toy for encryption or decryption might expose your keys in ways I can’t even think of, from using memory that might be swapped onto disk to providing an easy way for timing or other side-channel attacks.

Consider yourself warned, and stay tuned!