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Faster Crib Detection

"Exclusive" Regex Wildcards

One might recall the find_cribs function from last week's Monoalphabetic Substitution solver:

def find_cribs_backref(words, data, min_length=8, min_repeats=3):
    crib_words = []
    words = filter(lambda x:len(x)>min_length,words)
    words = filter(lambda x:(len(x)-len(set(x)))>min_repeats,words)
    for word in words:
        pattern,letters = backref_pattern(word)
        for hit in re.findall(pattern,data):
            if len(hit) != len(set(hit)): continue # capture groups must be distinct
            mapping=dict(zip(letters,hit))
            crib_words.append((word,backref_template(mapping),mapping))
            break
    return crib_words

 

This function scanned through the ciphertext to find letter patterns from interesting words (featuring repeated letters) with 4 steps:

  1. Find all words with 8+ characters and 3+ character repeats ('CODEPENDENT')
  2. Generate a regular expression pattern (r'(.)(.)(.)(.)(.)\4(.)\3\4\6(.)')
  3. Find all pattern matches in the ciphertext ([('ZSHPGPTHPTO','TUHPGPTHPTO'])
  4. Eliminate any non-distinct capture groups (charmap('TUHPGPTHPTO') => {'C':'T','N':'T'})

The 4th step was necessary because the capture groups used to identify specific backreferences (e.g. the 6th character matches the 4th character for 'CODEPENDENT') did not prohibit capture group overlap (e.g. the 1st and 2nd character should not match for 'CODEPENDENT'). This felt inelegant, but regular expression didn't seem to offer an easy fix to "capture everything EXCEPT the text in capture group 1". Fortunately, oren came up with a clever solution.

Oren's two-part solution was 1) translating the ciphertext into single-character backpointers and 2) rewriting capture groups with index-based character ranges. The first insight means converting each character of the text into either 0 ("we haven't seen it before") or the distance to last sighting ("we saw it 2 characters ago"). For example, CODEPENDENT turns into [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0, 5, 3, 3, 0] since the 2nd 'E' (index 6) occurs 2 units after the 1st 'E' (index 4). The second insight allows converting the backpointer array into a necessary & sufficient regular expression by replacing each non-zero with the same ASCII value (e.g. 2 => '\x02') and replacing each zero with an index-based character range (e.g. the 3rd chracter ('D') becomes r'[\x00\x03-\xff]'). That elegantly allows the 3rd character to have any value except the values in the 1st character ('\x02') or the 2nd character ('\x01').

 

def find_cribs_backptr(words, data, min_length=8, min_repeats=3):
    # thanks to https://github.com/OrenLeaffer the backptr method
    crib_words = []
    words = filter(lambda x:len(x)>min_length,words)
    words = filter(lambda x:(len(x)-len(set(x)))>min_repeats,words)
    dataref = ''.join(chr(c) for c in backptr_pattern(data))
    for word in words:
        pattern,letters = backptr_regex(word)
        for hit in re.findall(pattern,dataref):
            index = dataref.find(hit)
            mapping=dict(zip(word,data[index:index+len(word)]))
            crib_words.append((word,crib_template(mapping),mapping))
            break
    return crib_words

def backptr_pattern(data):
    refs={}
    refdata=[]
    for index,letter in enumerate(data):
        ref=refs.get(letter,index)
        if index-ref>255: ref=index
        refdata.append(index-ref)
        refs[letter]=index
    return refdata

def backptr_regex(data):
    regex = ''
    groups = 1
    mapping = []
    bref = backptr_pattern(data)
    for index,ref in enumerate(bref):
        if ref > 0: regex += '\\x%02x'%ref
        else:
            regex += '[\\x00\\x%02x-\\xff]'%(index+1)
            mapping.append(data[index])
    return regex,mapping

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the backpointer solution is slower than the backreference when the wordlist is large relative to the ciphertext and the text is highly differentiated (not one letter repeated 1000 times). This cost isn't from the relative complexity of the expressions though, but instead the cost of generating them (as the benchmarks below shows). Thanks Oren!

 

>>> timeit.timeit("import re;re.compile('[\\x00\\x01-\\xff][\\x00\\x02-\\xff][\\x00\\x03-\\xff][\\x00\\x04-\\xff][\\x00\\x05-\\xff]\\x02[\\x00\\x07-\\xff]\\x05\\x03\\x03[\\x00\\x0b-\\xff]')")
1.0376930236816406
>>> timeit.timeit("import re;re.compile('(.)(.)(.)(.)(.)\4(.)\3\4\6(.)')")
1.0382349491119385

>>> timeit.timeit("import re;re.findall('[\\x00\\x01-\\xff][\\x00\\x02-\\xff][\\x00\\x03-\\xff][\\x00\\x04-\\xff][\\x00\\x05-\\xff]\\x02[\\x00\\x07-\\xff]\\x05\\x03\\x03[\\x00\\x0b-\\xff]','%s')"%data,number=100000)
9.716220140457153
>>> timeit.timeit("import re;re.findall('(.)(.)(.)(.)(.)\4(.)\3\4\6(.)','%s')"%data,number=100000)
9.648783922195435

>>> timeit.timeit("import solve;solve.backptr_regex('CODEPENDENT')")
12.500058889389038
>>> timeit.timeit("import solve;solve.backref_regex('CODEPENDENT')")
6.2223169803619385

 

Full Python implementation available on Github