TL;DR

The ShiftRows function of AES, in Perl.

Reading the text, ShiftRows is not difficult to code, especially in a language like Perl that provides us a wide toolset of manipulation of arrays.

But, of course, I got it wrong the first time 🙄

What I did not read at all is that the 4x4 arrangement of the input block is by columns, not by rows. If you want to go down the same path, make sure you read section 3.4 of the standard where this is explained clearly and with a picture too!

Apart from this bump, adapting the algorithm to work with my representation of the state as a linear array was easy. I mean, it’s about moving stuff around, so it can be expressed in terms of properly re-indexing the original state array using the slice array operations:

sub shift_rows ($state) {
   state $sources =
      [0, 5, 10, 15, 4, 9, 14, 3, 8, 13, 2, 7, 12, 1, 6, 11];
   $state->@* = $state->@[$sources->@*];
   return $state;
}

As the indexes are fixed, it makes sense to store them permanently in a state variable. Or is it, really?!? I suspect this is one of those gut-feeling-optimizations that aren’t. Anyway, it’s there now and I’ll keep it.

The inverse operation for decryption is the following:

sub inv_shift_rows ($state) {
   state $sources =
      [0, 13, 10, 7, 4, 1, 14, 11, 8, 5, 2, 15, 12, 9, 6, 3];
   $state->@* = $state->@[$sources->@*];
   return $state;
}

It’s easy to see that these two operations are inverse to one another. As an example, item 1 is put in the 13th slot by shift_rows, whereas it is taken from slot 13 in inv_shift_rows. The first row is not rotated in either function, so items 0, 4, 8, and 12 remain fixed.

And now we got our second brick well firm on the bottom. Stay safe and tuned!