Ping from Morocco

I was feeling nostalgic the other day so I decided to take a trip down memory lane by browsing some old entries on my phone. To my surprise, I found a few encrypted files that I don't remember putting there. After trying a few passwords that made sense, it quickly became apparent that a mental dictionary-based brute force approach was not the way to go. I turned to Google in search of answers. The first pages mention an app that can decrypt .eslock files, and while it looked promising, I wasn't sure it would be smart to trust a black box of an app with data that I once deemed private enough to encrypt. I had to find another way. This blog post in particular caught my eye. It states that the password of an encrypted file is hashed with the MD5 algorithm then stored within the file itself ! Since MD5 is considered to be obsolete, surely I would be able to un-hash the password if I were to get my hands on it. With no pointers on how an .eslock file is structured, I figured I&

I bet you have called functions like these at some point in your life. They seemingly accept parameters that are separated by the pipe (or bitwise OR) operator. PHP's file() function, for instance, accepts an optional third parameter that can have one or more values. It's not uncommon for me to call it with the FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES | FILE_SKIP_EMPTY_LINES flags. But how do they actually work under the hood ? It turns out that it's only a matter of simple bitwise operations. Yes, the pipe operator was a dead giveaway but still. Let's try to implement a simple example to demonstrate how it works. I'll be using D in the code below, but the same rules apply to languages that support bitwise arithmetic. If your language of choice doesn't support them then I recommend that you stop using Brainfuck. Here's a problem that sounds like it could have some real world applications. Imagine that you're making a run of the mill RPG game where the main characte