Question

I am trying to obfuscate a string in a program. Currently, I only have a simple string reversal working. I would like to be able to perform XOR scrambling on the data to make it much more secure, however the method I have tried is not working.

The same function and input type is used to decode the string. This is no problem with string reversal, as it just reverses back, but can this be done easily with XORing without getting too complex? I would prefer if the process kept just the one string, like the reversal does. Here is my reversal function.

void reverse_string(unsigned char *buf, int length)
{
int i;
unsigned char temp;

    for (i = 0; i < length / 2; i++)
    {
        temp = buf[i];
        buf[i] = buf[length - i - 1];
        buf[length - i - 1] = temp;
    } 
}

And here is the attempt at a XOR function

void charxor(char * text, int len) {
const unsigned char enc[8]={173,135,131,121,110,119,187,143};
char ch;
int i;
int ind=0;
for (i=0;i<len;i++) {
    ch=*text++;
    if (ch)
        *text = ch ^ enc[ind++];
    ind %=8;
}


}

Can anyone help? Would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

You seem to be overcomplicating things a bit. Try this instead:

void charxor (unsigned char *text, int len) {
    const unsigned char enc[8] = {173,135,131,121,110,119,187,143};
    int i;
    for (i = 0; i < len; i++) {
        text[i] ^= enc[i % 8];
    }
}

Note that the XOR operation can introduce null chars into the string, so you really do need to keep track of its length instead of just relying on the presence of a trailing null char.

Also keep in mind that, while this may indeed be relatively speaking “much more secure” than just reversing the string, any reasonably clever person with access to enough samples of the output can probably figure out how to decode it in around fifteen minutes or so.