Let's say you want to encrypt something via AES. One of the first things you'll have to do is generate a key. Suppose one generated a key by taking the current unix timestamp (seconds since Jan 01 1970), and passing that into md5 to get the key. Reference python below:

from hashlib import md5
from time import time

def genkey():
    i = int(time())
    return md5(str(i)).digest()

Then some secret string was encrypted (via AES-ECB i.e.vanilla AES and with no padding) to get the following ciphertext:

0xa99210d796a1e37503febf65c329c1b2

What is the secret string (ASCII encoded)? Hint: I generated the key the week of Monday, January 25th, 2016.

Solution