For this year’s birthday the most awesome gift I received was from hasherazade 🙂
I am very thankful to her for making my birthday so special 🙂
This crackme is a bootloader written in 16-bit assembly. This is how this look like.

After attaching the process to IDA I placed a breakpoint in the user input and this is the algorithm which calculates the password.

sub_7C5C proc near
push si
xor ax, ax
mov word_7DCB, ax

loc_7C62:
test cx, cx
jz loc_7C72

xor byte ptr word_7DCB+1, ah
lodsw
dec cx
add word_7DCB, ax
jmp short loc_7C62

loc_7C72:
pop si
retn
sub_7C5C endp

After calculating, the result is compared with 0x39A.

There can be lots of possible collisions in this algorithm. I used a dictionary file to find all possible combinations of 0x39a. This is the cpp code using inline assembly.

This is cpp version where I’ve written the algorithm in cpp.

The results: http://pastebin.com/9rMwwVgq
Any of these passwords work 🙂 but the correct password to unlock the source code in the link is “awesome” 🙂

Once again Thank You so much! ❤