Decrypting an encrypted aes 256 cbc text with random IV, decrypts the string [duplicate]

Question

This may be a basic question but bear with me.

I started encrypting a text with aes 256 cbc mode generating a random iv of 16 bytes and a key.

text = 'hi I am learning encryption.';

Then I created another random iv and tried to decrypt the encrypted text. ( I know we are supposed to use the same iv we used for encryption to decrypt the ciphered text).

The result came as

(some rubbish text) encryption.

Then I padded the main text with 16 random characters, encrypted it and decrypted it I get my actual text padded with some junk text at the start.

I am unable to figure out why it messes with the first 16 bytes of text and then successfully extracts the remaining.

Can you explain?

Answer 1

Here is the picture for CBC decryption ($\oplus$ is the XOR operation of each bit/byte at the same position of the input blocks):

As you can see only the first block is altered by the IV.

During encryption every block is changed because the ciphertext will propagate the uniqueness of the IV over all subsequent blocks. However, during decryption only the first block is XOR'ed with the IV to get back the first block of plaintext.

If that block is random then the result will also be random. The rest of the blocks is unaffected.

If you change just a single bit of the original IV, then only that particular bit in the plaintext block will be affected.