David Wong

cryptologie.net

cryptography, security, and random thoughts

Hey! I'm David, cofounder of zkSecurity, research advisor at Archetype, and author of the Real-World Cryptography book. I was previously a cryptography architect of Mina at O(1) Labs, the security lead for Libra/Diem at Facebook, and a security engineer at the Cryptography Services of NCC Group. Welcome to my blog about cryptography, security, and other related topics.

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Bug in KangarooTwelve's reference implementation

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When playing around with KangarooTwelve I noticed that the python implementation’s right_encode() function was not consistent with the C version:

python implementation of right_encode

λ python right_encode.py            
right_encode(0): [0]
right_encode(1): [1][3]
right_encode(2): [2][3]
right_encode(255): [255][5]
right_encode(256): [1][0][6]
right_encode(257): [1][1][6]

C implementation of right_encode:

λ ./right_encode        
right_encode(0): 00
right_encode(1): 0101
right_encode(2): 0201
right_encode(255): ff01
right_encode(256): 010002
right_encode(257): 010102

The problem was that the python implementation used the function bytes() to create byte strings, which has breaking behaviors between python2 and python3.

python2:

>>> bytes([1])
'[1]'

python3:

>>> bytes([1])
b'\x01'

The fix was to use bytearray() instead which is consistent across the two versions of Python.

← back to all posts blog • 2017-05-18
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Bug in KangarooTwelve's reference implementation
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