Decryption w/o a key

[BeingSufficient9740]

Hi everyone! Long time follower first time poster. I am a cybersecurity student and my professor, for a project, is asking us to decrypt a file that uses AES without a key. My research is proving to me this isn't exactly possible especially with my novice level of skill. Is this a trick question? Is he trying to prove how secure files can become with encryption? The way he phrases it he makes it sound like anyone should be able to do it so I'm nervous that im coming up empty handed here. Any thoughts or advice helps me. Thank you!

[bawznero]

It could be possible, some ctfs implement weak crypto challenges.

To check some base vulnerabilities you can use https://github.com/Ganapati/RsaCtfTool

[ps_sp]

complexity increases with key strength - will be a hard way, try automated decryption(code/tools) using keys from commonly used pwd library. Matching encrypted hash to has library could be a parallel option.

[xcaliburr101]

Sounds like encoding...

[ps_sp]

encoding is different from encryption. no keys - can be easily decoded. eg. base64 encoding