Redesign of Sguil website
Posted by creining | Filed under Security
Scott redesigned the Sguil website. Looks great! Bamm finally got around to registering sguil.{net,org,com} domains and I have a shiny new email address: creining(at)sguil(dot)net.
1987 article on information theft
Posted by creining | Filed under Security
The Battle of the Bugs, Newsweek’s 1987 article about information theft.
Firefox extension Sage
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
I recently installed the Firefox extension Sage, which is a lightweight RSS and ATOM feed aggregator. I’m all about efficiency, and Sage assists me in hitting all the news sites (multiple times) daily. I had never used a news aggregator before as the ones historically available were desktop based and I didn’t want to have yet another application to run and maintain. The integration with Firefox is slick and very easy to set up. After installing Sage (Tools->Extensions->Get More Extensions) and restarting Firefox I went to View->Sidebar->Sage which popped open the Sage sidebar. I then created a Bookmarks folder called “Feeds” and configured Sage to use that folder as its feed folder. Next I added all my favorite sites RSS urls (Slashdot, OpenBSD Journal, SecurityFocus News, TaoSecurity, Dilbert, Salon, BBC News, Economist, NPR) which then show up in the top pane of the Sage sidebar. Clicking through the feeds show the news items in the bottom pane and by clicking on the news items they show up in the browser pane. I like the tooltips on the news items. I disliked the “Render feeds in content area” option within Sage and turned it off. I also added the Sage toolbar icon by going to View->Toolbars->Customize. Overall, very cool extension to a very cool browser.
The Kernel Exploit Timeline
Posted by creining | Filed under Security
The Kernel Exploit Timeline covers the process of patching the linux kernel for a bug that allowed a 20 line C program to trigger a floating point exception that put the kernel into an unusable state. As most people close to me know, I tend to favor open source software over proprietary software. One of the reasons I do, is because of the turnaround time on security fixes. The open source developers value their reputations much more than anything else (when money is not in the mix, what else is there?). And a reputation goes a long way in the open source world. For instance, I wouldn’t hesitate using any of DJBs software, because I know he is an extremely security-conscious coder. And I think that reputation is something that you don’t find in the commercial world. At Microsoft they churn out bug ridden bloated code and most people still buy it. Where’s the motivation to write secure code? Where’s the motivation to release patches in a timely matter? The coders still go home with a paycheck no matter how many bugs are teeming in the code and no matter how long it takes to get that patch out. With respect to the linux kernel exploit, it would appear that from disclosure (with exploit code) to the major distributions announcing a new kernel was not more than 5 days. 5 days! That’s a great turnaround and it’s worth noting that there was a temporary patch available in less than 2 days. There’s a huge difference here. The linux folks reacted and solved the problem. They didn’t sit around pissing on their hands for months and making excuses like a lot of vendors do.
MD5 cracking with rainbow tables
Posted by creining | Filed under Security
MD5 Online Cracking is a website that will crack hashes but only at this time supports lowercase letters and/or digits up to a length of 8 characters. It uses RainbowCrack which is an implementation of the techniques described in Philippe Oechslin’s research into Making a Faster Cryptanalytic Time-Memory Trade-Off. RainbowCrack differs from a traditional brute force cracker that trys all possible plaintexts one by one against the hash by precomputing all possible plaintext -> ciphertext pairs in advance and storing them in a file deemed the “rainbow table”. This way, cracking a hash takes mere seconds. Philippe Oechslin also oversaw the Advanced Instant NT Password Cracker or How to crack a NT password in 5 seconds project which had an online demo but had to be pulled after one week of online time amounted to over a million hits. Also, it is worth mentioning that most *nix based systems use salted hashes which perturbs the encryption algorith in one of 4096 different ways therefore defeating attacks of the RainbowCrack type.