[MMA 2015] QR Code Recovery

The Plaid Parliament of Pwning participated in (and won) the first-ever MMA CTF in 2015 hosted by the Japanese team TokyoWesterns. Here’s a writeup of one of the problems, which was to recover the contents of a corrupted QR code. It was categorized as a miscellaneous problem and worth 400 points (a medium-hard problem).

We’re given a QR code which is missing a ton of pixels:

original QR code

Obviously, if you try to scan the QR code with a normal reader, nothing will happen. I chose to solve this challenge by reconstructing and decoding the QR code by hand. It’s pretty time-consuming but I learned a lot about how QR codes work in the process.

There’s a fantastic QR Code Tutorial online which provides lots of details about the format. It lays out seven steps to encode a QR code:

  1. Determine which encoding mode to use
  2. Encode the data
  3. Generate error correction codewords
  4. Interleave blocks if necessary
  5. Place the data and error correction bits in the matrix
  6. Apply the mask patterns and determine which one results in the lowest penalty
  7. Add format and version information

I followed the steps in reverse, making repairs where necessary.

Format and Version Information

First off, from the size of the QR code (25×25) we can infer it is a “version 2” code. QR codes have a fixed set of patterns that are placed in predictable locations. This image lays out those different fixed patterns:

QR code format

Since we know exactly where the Finder, Timing and Alignment patterns are, we can reconstruct those pretty simply. Version 2 codes don’t have “Version Info” so we ignore that. Finally, for the Format Info, we have to reconstruct that based on what is visible.

The format information is encoded twice. One instance is wrapped around the top-left Finder, and the other instance is split in half between the bottom-left and top-right Finder patterns. The format information consists of exactly 15 bits. Here are the bits we can see in our QR code:

??????011011010

(note that white=0 and black=1). We look up the partial bits in the Format and Version String Tables and find that it corresponds to ECC Level Q, Mask Pattern 6. The full format information string is

010111011011010

and so we can encode that, together with the repaired fixed patterns:

format and version code

and overlay that on the challenge code:

format and version code overlaid

Alas, that still doesn’t scan. Guess we’ll try to extract the bits by hand.

Data Masking

The QR code is masked to break up patterns (e.g. uniform regions, areas that look like QR code format patterns, etc.). The format has eight different mask patterns defined. Each mask is a 6×6 repeating pattern which is XORed across the packed data bits.

In our case, the format information says we’re using mask 6, which looks like this:

mask number 6

We apply the mask to our challenge image (inverting where the mask is black) and overlay the original format information (greyed out so the data bits are clearly shown):

after masking

Now we just have to extract the data bits.

Module Placement in Matrix

The bits of the message are placed into the QR code matrix in a very particular order. Starting from the bottom right, bits are packed into two columns at a time, moving in a snake-like pattern up and down:

data bit order

The bits are packed as 8-bit units. This diagram shows where those unit boundaries are in a version 2 code:

version 2 data unit boundaries

We overlay this guide on top of our QR code:

boundaries overlaid

and start reading off the bits. Here are the bits that I extracted (with ? where the bit is missing):

00100000
10100010
10111000
00111010
01011001
10011010
10001000
????????
????????
????????
????????
????????
????????
????????
????????
??00000?
1???????
????????
????????
????????
????????
??010001
00100100
1???????
????????
????????
?????010
11000011
10000000
10101100
00010000
11100100
10101010
10011001
01100110
????????
????????
?????0?0
0000000?
????????
????????
????????
????????
????????

There’s a lot of missing bits there. Maybe error correction can help?

Structure Final Message

Because this is a version 2 code, there’s only one block of data and error bits. Therefore, no structuring is required: the error bits immediately follow the data bits.

There’s a total of 22 data bytes and 22 error bytes, since we’re using a “Q”-level code.

Error Correction Coding

This is where it gets interesting. QR codes use Reed-Solomon error correction coding at the byte level. At the Q level, it can recover from 25% of the bytes being corrupt. Unfortunately, we have only 16 intact bytes, or over 63% of the bytes missing. So maybe this isn’t doable after all…

…until you look carefully at Reed-Solomon’s error correcting capabilities and realize that it can correct up to twice as many erasures – that is, if it knows where the errors are, the error correction capabilities are much stronger. That means our code can recover from up to 50% of the bytes being missing! But that means we can only correct up to 22 missing bytes; we’re missing 28. Maybe we can obtain some missing bytes based on the data encoding?

Let’s set aside error correction coding for now and look at the data format.

Data Encoding

Our message starts with the bits 0010, which according to this table means the code is in the alphanumeric mode. Since it’s a version 2 QR code, the next 9 bits are the length. Those bits are 000010100, which means that there are 20 characters.

In the alphanumeric mode, every pair of characters is packed into an 11-bit chunk. Thus, there are a total of 110 bits for the payload.

Here are the data bits we have, broken down:

0010 [mode=alphanumeric]
000010100 [length=20]
01010111000 ["FL"]
00111010010 ["AG"]
11001100110 [" I"]
1010001000? ["S?"]

What a troll – the visible bits just say “FLAG IS”. Well, guess we’re definitely going to have to recover the flag itself from error correction.

Format Q gives us 22 bytes, or 176 bits of data. We only use 4+9+110 = 123 bits, so the rest of the data segment has to be padded. The QR code spec says that we add up to 4 zero bits of “terminator”, then zero bits up to a byte boundary, then add pad bytes up to the data limit. The pad bytes just alternate between 11101100 and 00010001. If we apply that to our data bits, we get

00100000
10100010
10111000
00111010
01011001
10011010
10001000
????????
????????
????????
????????
????????
????????
????????
????????
??000000 <-- terminator here, padded up to 0s
11101100 <-- padding bytes here
00010001
11101100
00010001
11101100
00010001

Woohoo! By adding the pad bytes that we already know (from the data encoding format), we have successfully recovered 6 bytes, bringing the total number of missing bytes down to 22. Now we can apply error correction!

Error Correction, again

Happily, someone has already written a QR-compatible Reed-Solomon library for Python, so I don’t have to figure out all the nitty-gritty math involved.

We use reedsolo.rs_correct_msg to correct the message with the erasure positions set (see rs_recover.py) and recover the message:

00100000
10100010
10111000
00111010
01011001
10011010
10001000
00101111
10000110
11100010
10110110
10011001
01001010
11000011
00010101
00000000
11101100
00010001
11101100
00010001
11101100
00010001

Split that up and decode:

0010 [mode=alphanumeric]
000010100 [length=20]
01010111000 ["FL"]
00111010010 ["AG"]
11001100110 [" I"]
10100010000 ["S "]
01011111000 ["G+"]
01101110001 ["JQ"]
01011011010 ["GA"]
01100101001 ["H:"]
01011000011 ["FW"]
00010101000 ["3X"]
0000 [terminator]
0 [byte padding]
11101100 00010001 [pad bytes]
11101100 00010001
11101100 00010001

And so the flag is G+JQGAH:FW3X! It might seem random and meaningless, but trust me, it’s the right flag 🙂

Here’s the full QR code, if you’re curious:

full fixed QR code

This was obtained by encoding the message using this online encoder; because of the stringency of the QR code spec, the output uses the same settings as the original code did, and so the same QR code is obtained.

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