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Bitland.Net Security Notes
Comments? email jwilkins-at-bitland*net
More information on the author at Jonathan Wilkins's home page RSS feed available at http://www.bitland.net/index.rss 
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| Archives: 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000 |
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| CGD for OpenBSD | (2003/11/13 18:20) |
As mentioned before, I'd been planning on testing out CGD for OpenBSD. I finally got my lazy ass around to it and set it up on OpenBSD 3.4. There were a couple of minor Makefile tweaks necessary, but I've got it up and running with a 50GB partition. So far it's working well. If another week or two of testing goes well, I'm going to redo all of my Linux/Loop-AES installs and replace them with OpenBSD/CGD. |
| +digg | +del.icio.us | [Crypto ] | Permanent link |
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| CD Shredders | (2003/11/13 18:15) |
I recently bought what I thought was a CD shredder from Fry's Electronics and when I got it home I discovered that all it did was put divots all over the surface. Obviously this is pretty useless. I was much more impressed when I saw Time Magazine's cool invention list which had a real CD shredder When you happen to impulse buy, be sure to get one of the latter devices, not one of the former. |
| +digg | +del.icio.us | [Misc ] | Permanent link |
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| Reverse Engineering Links | (2003/11/13 18:00) |
I've got a couple of links on reverse engineering and disassembly that I've been meaning to post for ages. First, there's a book that I've been reading called Hacker Disassembling Uncovered which gives a good overview on IDA and SoftICE techniques. It's fairly rough in places, but it's really the only reference I know of (outside of taking one of Halvar's courses). I also ran across an ebook called Introduction to Reverse Engineering Software which is worth a look. |
| +digg | +del.icio.us | [ReverseEngineering ] | Permanent link |
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| Wiping disks | (2003/10/15 08:00) |
Destroying the data on a disk is a fairly complicated thing to do. Peter Guttman wrote a fairly comprehensive paper on this a few years ago in which he recommended 3 wipes with random data as being sufficient for modern IDE drives. If you agree with him, there's still the issue of how to go about this in a reasonable amount of time. Here's what I do: I use an OpenBSD boot floppy or boot CD and kick it into the shell when it prompts me. Then I use dd to write and /dev/arandom to overwrite the disk. dd if=/dev/arandom of=/dev/rwd0c bs=32768In my experiments, optimal speed was gained by specifying a block size of 32768. Other block sizes may work better with your drive. Do a couple of tests and figure out what's best for you. Hitting ctrl-T will give you status at any time Peter Guttman's paper on wiping disks |
| +digg | +del.icio.us | [Security ] | Permanent link |
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| Novel idea for legal P2P system | (2003/07/19 20:00) |
The Inquirer has posted an article describing a very cool idea for a P2P application. Instead of storing files that they don't own, participants each stream audio they'd like to hear from other people who do own the content. If you're sharing a file, you only pay the streaming rate which (unless you're the only one who owns and is sharing a copy of the next Madonna album) adds up to a couple of dollars a year. Check it out: How to infuriate the RIAA and stay enragingly legal |
| +digg | +del.icio.us | [P2P ] | Permanent link |
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| HTTPS Testing tools | (2003/05/31 18:00) |
Testing straight HTTP pages is easy. Just fire up netcat and go. (Actually, this gets a bit more complicated with IIS6 as it doesn't accept \n's in leiu of \r\n's, which is bloody annoying) Testing HTTPS is a bit harder. You have to throw something that speaks SSL in the way. This comes up on the various SecurityFocus mailing lists every once in a while, so I thought I'd aggregate some of the suggestions. OpenSSL OpenSSL comes with a command line tool that allows you to put arbitrary TCP streams over SSL. This can be combined with netcat easily. @Stake's WebProxy WebProxy 2.1 is way better than previous versions. It will do SSL MITM for proxied connections. I don't know anything about the following tools, they were recommended on the lists. Exodus HTTPPush Sleuth Sleuth 1.36 (free, Linux) SSL-Proxy |
| +digg | +del.icio.us | [Tools ] | Permanent link |
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| ClusterKnoppix | (2003/05/29 11:55) |
ClusterKnoppix allows you to turn any random pile of computers into a cluster using only bootable CDs. No reinstall required. ClusterKnoppix |
| +digg | +del.icio.us | [Computing ] | Permanent link |
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| Sites that archive exploits | (2003/05/03 17:20) |
Packetstorm is the largest site and longest running site that's still alive. Hack.co.za seems to have made a welcome reappearance after a long hiatus. xfocus.org has a nice collection. Securityfocus has exploits archived and searchable at http://www.securityfocus.com/bid The search on the main page is unusable but that url works. |
| +digg | +del.icio.us | [Exploits ] | Permanent link |
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| Cryptographic Filesystems | (2003/05/03 10:50) |
Linux's LoopAES is currently my favorite disk crypto system. I've been using it on my main fileserver for about 6 months with no problems. I run Mandrake and it comes with support for LoopAES out of the box. When I was initially investigating disk crypto, I found a Survey of disk crypto systems which, while a little old, was quite helpful. I used to use CFS on FreeBSD but had some trouble with corruption. Also, since I had a large RAID array, fscking after a reboot sometimes took hours. Other people claim to have had better luck with TCFS OpenBSD's disk crypto is fairly primitive at the moment. The FAQ recommends that you use vnconfig, but that's limited to 2GB, which is really too small. However, when I was at CanSecWest this year, Theo told me to ask Ted Unangst (one of the OpenBSD guys) about disk crypto and he pointed me at his page on Cryptographic Disk Device for OpenBSD which is supposed to support large disks. I haven't tried it yet but figured I'd link it in case someone else finds it useful. UPDATE: CGD for OpenBSD is based on CGD for NetBSD which was written by Roland Dowdeswell. You might want to read his USENIX paper on CGD |
| +digg | +del.icio.us | [Crypto ] | Permanent link |
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| A bunch of password cracking links | (2003/05/03 10:10) |
Medussa is a distributed password grinder that does MD5, regular unix crypt and NTLM among others. COTSE has a few lists of wordlists Wordlist collection 1 and Wordlist collection 2 You can also build your own grinder with the Password Cracking Library And no list of password grinders would be complete without mentioning John the Ripper If you're just curious about how good your password is, CertainKey has a Password Strength Analyser which runs as a Java applet. |
| +digg | +del.icio.us | [Passwords ] | Permanent link |
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| Blogging inspiration | (2003/05/02 21:00) |
Cory Doctorow wrote an article for the O'Reilly network on blogging about a year ago. He discusses his blog as being an outboard brain and talks about why he thinks it's a more efficient way of dealing with the large amounts of information that we all have to manage these days. Also, since he's a really great writer it's an excellent read. Cory Doctorow's "My Blog, My Outboard Brain" The upshot of this is that I've decided to move all of the links I've assembled at backflip.com over here in the hopes that they will be more useful. I've got about 300, so not all will make the cut, and it will take some time but I think it's a sound plan. |
| +digg | +del.icio.us | [Misc ] | Permanent link |
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| L3Edit Tool Released | (2003/02/02 22:56) |
I wrote a tool to allow direct manipulation of ethernet frames. It's handy for testing binary protocols. It has two modes, the first allows automatic randomizing of frames and the second allows manual editing. It's available Here Comments are welcomed.. email me: jwilkins at bitland dot net |
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