Eduardo Novella

I am a mobile security research engineer at NowSecure. Also, independent contractor evaluating mobile payments, DRM, whitebox crypto, video-games, malware, embedded devices and all related with software security. Based in Europe/UK/US

R2con CTF Android CrackMe: Radare2 Pay v1.0

03 Sep 2020 » android, reverse

0

“The Radare2 community always dreamed with its decentralized and free currency to allow r2 fans to make payments in places and transfer money between r2 users. A debug version has been developed and it will be supported very soon in many stores and websites. Can you verify that this is cryptographically unbreakable?”

Summary

Radare2Pay Android CrackMe aims at being similar to popular mobile payment applications such as Google Pay, the Radare2 Pay app is difficult to crack. It features layers and layers of obfuscation and protection and anti-rooting technology in order to delay attacks. The developers used white box cryptography and created their own version of Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) with anti-Frida protections to make it harder to recover the payment keys. It was intentionally developed for the Radare2 Conference 2020 and later highly softened for the OWASP crackme series.

Download R2pay here

Authors

Goals

There are two flags you need to figure out:

  • There is a master PIN code that generates green tokens (aka r2coins) on the screen. If you see a red r2coin, then this token won’t be validated by the community. You need to find out the 4 digits PIN code and the salt employed as well. Flag: r2con{PIN_NUMERIC:SALT_LOWERCASE}

  • There is a “r2pay master key” buried in layers of obfuscation and protections. Can you break the whitebox? Flag: r2con{ascii(key)}

Security mechanisms

We have implemented the following protections in the mobile application:

  • Java root checks
  • Java obfuscation
  • Obfuscated Whitebox cryptography
  • Manual code obfuscation though conditional tricks
  • Native root checks
  • Native anti-debugging
  • Native inline assembly syscalls
  • Native code integrity checks
  • Native memory checksumming
  • Native anti-DBI (Dynamic Binary Instrumentation)
  • Native obfuscation
  • Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP)

Before get started

Hint: Run the APK in a non-tampered device to play a bit with the app.

1

Radare2 Pay app tokenizing a r2coin

Possibles solutions

References