blog.dornea.nu

Building a personal book library with NotebookLM and Claude Code

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ever since I started highlighting text on my Kindle, then my PocketBook, and also the old-fashioned way with pen and paper, I have been trying to store those highlights in my digital garden — which serves as a second brain for recalling insights from books I have read. I built brainfck.org to keep my collection of notes available online, not only for myself but also for others. I even added a search feature (first introduced in ce36502 and later improved in 9a23b40) that lets you search across the entire collection.

Claude Code customizations in Emacs

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using Claude for almost two years now, and about six months ago I switched completely to claude-code for most coding activities. I was initially using gptel and ellama, but at some point I came across claude-code.el, which allowed me to smoothly integrate Claude Code into Emacs. In this post I’ll share my customizations — yes, most of them were generated by Claude. Setup # Dependencies: inheritenv and eat as terminal backend.

Using forge with gh CLI token

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Update 2026-04-17: A Reddit comment pointed out a cleaner approach: instead of advising ghub--token directly, you can register a proper auth-source backend. This way any package that uses auth-source (not just ghub/forge) benefits automatically. Both approaches are documented below. Forge requires a GitHub token stored in ~/.authinfo or ~/.netrc. For GitHub Enterprise (e.g., corporate instances), this means: Manually creating a PAT (Personal Access Token) in the GitHub UI Figuring out the right OAuth scopes Storing it securely Remembering to rotate it If you already use the gh CLI and are authenticated, you have a perfectly good token — why not reuse it?

Book Summaries: April-December 2025

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is a collection of book summaries for the books I read during April-December 2025. Politics # 📚 Baustellen der Nation # Philip Banse & Ulf Buermeyer — Goodreads • Notes This book is about construction sites (German: “Baustellen”) of the nation in Germany. It covers different aspects of what works well in Germany and what doesn’t. Among the construction sites you’ll find different chapters on: The land of crumbling bridges

My 2025 review

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 11:35:42 +0100

Although it has been a while since my last post here, I don’t want to break with the tradition of doing my annual review (make sure to check out the previous years: 2021, 2023, 2024). Coming back to writing again feels like something I should have done months ago, but hey, it’s never too late. I used to have this habit of writing, especially in the morning, but this year most of the time I didn’t really feel like I wanted to write.

Digital and Analogue: The balance that works for me

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 06:35:34 +0200

There is certainly some frustration with productivity tools that feel more like a burden than a boost. During my career I’ve tried different digital planners, time-blocking apps, task managers, only to find myself overhelmed by their complexity and not really matching my personal workflow. The truth is, the tools are not the problem: it’s how we use them. Instead of adopting new tools, one should first come up with a strategy/workflow that respects the need for focus and creativity.

Add pagefind search to hugo

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 09:11:24 +0200

Every PKMS/BASB needs a search functionality. Ever since I’ve created brainfck to host my own collection of thoughts/ideas/resources (aka Zettelkasten) I wanted to be able to actually search within my collection of org-roam based notes. Meanwhile for all my sites I own (this blog, my CV/portfolio, brainfck and defersec) I use hugo. All of them didn’t have proper search capabilities. That’s why I was looking for a proper way to include search functionalities without any major effort.

Book Summaries: January - March 2025

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Continuing with my tradition of quarterly book summaries, here are my reflections on the books I’ve read between January and March this year. Politics # 📚 Tyranny of the Minority # 👉 Tyranny of the Minority by Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt At the beginning the title seemed very strange to me since my first thought was: “How can a minority overrule the majority?” As the authors put it: Majorities must also be constrained in a second area: the rules of democracy itself.

Book Summaries: October - December 2024

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Continuing with my tradition of quarterly book summaries, here are my reflections on the books I’ve read between October and December last year. Biographies # 📚 Elon Musk # 👉 Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson I must admit I’m definitely not a fan of Elon Musk and had some curiosity to learn more about the person behind the public façade. I wanted to learn more about all the aspects that shaped him and his mindset.

My 2024 review

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 10:00:00 +0100

As another year comes to an end, it’s time for my annual review (check out 2021, 2023) - a tradition where I reflect on the past twelve months, examining what I’ve learned, how I’ve grown, and whether I’ve managed to stick to my goals. These reviews serve as a personal chronicle but also a way to share experiences that might resonate with others on similar journeys. 2024 has been a year of significant transitions and new beginnings.

Mastering Golang Debugging in Emacs

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction # Since I’ve started developing in Golang I didn’t really use the debugger. Instead I was naively adding fmt.Print statements everywhere to validate my code 🙈. While print statements and logs might be also your first debugging instinct, they often fall short when dealing with large and complex code base, with sophisticated runtime behaviour and (of course!) complex concurrency issues that seem impossible to reproduce. After starting working on more complex projects Like this one: https://github.

Book summaries: May - September 2024

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 06:59:29 +0200

Keeping with the theme I’ve started a few months ago, here are my own book summaries for the books I’ve read between May and September this year. Social Sciences and Psychology # 📚 Lost Connections # 👉 Lost Connections - Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari After reading The Lonely Century last year, which opened my eyes to the increasing isolation in our lives, I was kind of motivated to read more on that topic.

Bye Bye Cashlink!

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 09:12:32 +0200

In the midst of the Corona pandemic back in 2021, I joined the team at Cashlink, a company focused on tokenization and digital securities. You can also check out their whitepaper and learn more here. With little understanding of these concepts, I embarked on this new journey as a Senior Security Engineer within the TECH team. Promised a greenfield environment, I stepped into the unknown, excited yet uncertain about what I was expected to to.

Book summaries: January - April 2024

Sun, 05 May 2024 20:03:02 +0200

Inspired by Eli Bendersky’s book reviews, here are my summaries for the books I’ve read between January and April 2024. 📚 Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant I’ve received this book shortly after reading The Scout Mindset where I learned about the soldier vs scout mindset where the later one can be shortly described in one quote: “Your strength as a scout is in your ability… to think in shades of gray instead of black and white.

From Doom to Vanilla Emacs

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 19:58:33 +0100

Why vanilla? # Let’s start with the most obvious question: What’s wrong with Doom Emacs? Short answer: There is nothing wrong with Doom Emacs. I still use it and I still recommend it for beginners. Some years ago I started with Spacemacs and moved to Doom which, in my humble opinion, is far faster and more stable. So if you’re a novice and just entered the “church of Emacs” The “Church of Emacs” is a humorous reference to the strong advocacy and devotion some Emacs users have towards the Emacs text editor.

My 2023 review

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 21:47:51 +0100

I feel somewhat ashamed for not doing a review last year. However, this year I have set aside some time to reflect on the highlights of this year, what I have learned, the habits I have changed, and the habits I have stucked to. The following is my review for 2023, divided into several sections. Books # This year I’ve finally reactivated my Goodreads profile primarily for getting book recommendations. Although I have my own TODO list for reading, which continues to grow each year, I’m always curious to see what others have read addtionally after finishing one book.

Documentation as Code for Cloud - C4 Model & Structurizr

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 21:57:59 +0100

Introduction # In the last post, I’ve used PlantUML to draw things like groups, accounts, and clusters. However, I didn’t focus on how different parts inside the business layer interact (usually components related to the main application/system relevant for your business). Now, we’ll use a DSL Domain-Specific Language specific for this use case to show these interactions between components, services, and systems. I’ll use the C4 model to show the same system in different ways based on who we’re showing it to.

Emacs and the Cybernetic Productivity

Thu, 21 Sep 2023 22:03:10 +0200

A few days ago I came across Cal Newport’s episode on “The failure of Cybernetic Productivity " where he talked about a term I’ve never heard before: Cybernetic Productivity. This productivity concept has been prominent since the early 2000s and has served as an effective strategy for managing the growing workload, particularly among knowledge workers . Now, let’s delve into the principles: Automate and speed up shallow task as much as possible Have software tools “speak” with other ones, send data from your browser to your Exceel sheet or to your editor (and vice versa) use as less clicks as possible automate all the things ™ Try to keep needed information at your finger tips make it easy to organize and get access to information the more we have the right information when we need it, the more effective knowledge workers we are going to be Example: Google You can search for all types of information In general knowledge management tools implement this principle that information should never be to far from the person who needs it Remove friction from communication communication has to be easy if friction is removed, high velocity communication / colaboration can be achieved Simplify the extraction of actionable wisdom from data the information we need to do things is often hidden in data we need tools that can find trends we need tools that can extract wisdom from data so we can have it at our finger tips According to Cal Newport this approach doesn’t work because of the so called infinite buffer.

Parse podcast transcripts using ChatGPT

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 20:55:37 +0200

I regularly listen to the podcast Lage der Nation which offers transcripts to premium subscribers on their website plus.ladernation.org. To export quotes from a recent episode and add them to my private knowledge database, I followed these steps: I activated the developer console in my browser. In the network tab of the console, I saw a GET request to a URL like https://plus.lagedernation.org/<...>/?podlove_transcript=json, which fetches the JSON version of the transcripts (provided by podlove).

Documentation as Code for Cloud - PlantUML

Sun, 30 Jul 2023 21:27:03 +0200

Basics # I’ve become a huge fan of PlantUML even before I came across the concept of “documentation as code” I also code for presentations. So the term presentation as code is also a thing. and it instantly won me over with its capabilities. I have used it in many different roles (software engineer, security engineer, security architect) extensively to draw diagrams (components, sequences) and mind maps. Though initially, the general syntax might seem a bit challenging to understand, I believe that with some dedication, the learning curve becomes quite manageable.

Documentation as Code for Cloud

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 09:07:33 +0200

Introduction # As a Security Architect, my role encompasses reviewing existing architectures as well as designing brand new ones from scratch. The opportunity to apply Security principles during the design phase and develop an entirely new infrastructure with Security as the core focus is truly exceptional. Designing a secure cloud architecture is not only vital for achieving scalability, reliability, and compliance with regulations. It allows businesses to optimize their cloud infrastructure while maintaining the highest levels of data security.

AWS Summit 2023 in Berlin

Tue, 09 May 2023 21:20:17 +0200

The stage for the keynote Introduction # During this year’s keynote, the main focus was on the velocity companies - and especially start-ups - need in order to bring their products to the market, highlighting the importance of agility. I was particularly surprised to learn that Flixbus is fully managing their infrastructure in AWS, showcasing the power and potential of cloud technologies. It’s impressive to see how Flixbus has invested in their tech stack, especially during the pandemic when travel was at an all-time low.

Read Hackernews and Reddit the Emacs way

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 07:14:42 +0200

Motivation # Usually when I consume my daily news feeds, I prefer to keep context switching to a minimum. Whether you’re a busy professional or just someone who values their time, you might want to streamline your online reading experience as much as possible. For me, this means sticking to Emacs and using tools like elfeed and pocket-reader to stay on top of my reading list. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t work with content served within comments at Hackernews or Reddit, where you usually have lots of comments and discussion threads.

AWS Custom resources with Lambda and Golang

Thu, 06 Apr 2023 16:22:13 +0200

Motivation # CDK is a great framework by AWS that allows you to define cloud infrastructure as code (IaC). You can use your favourite programming language such as TypeScript, Python, Java, Golang to define your resources. This feature is particularly convenient as it automates the generation of CloudFormation templates in a readable and more manageable way. However, not every AWS resource can be mapped directly to a CloudFormation template using CDK.

Book summary: Fooled by randomness

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 20:58:50 +0100

I must admit “Fooled by Randomness” was a hard to digest food for my brain. I had the same feeling while I was reading Thinking: Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. What do these books have in common? They both deal with human behavior, probability, stochastics, heuristics. These are concepts for which humans don’t necessarily have a born ability to understand and to deal with. Taleb used to be a trader in the financial market before he got more into mathematics and the science of economics.

Book summary: Four Thousand Weeks

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 07:05:00 +0100

Imagine you’d ask an oracle (like the one in the Matrix movie) how much time left you have on this planet before the inevitable takes place - you die. Suppose she/he/it Who knows, maybe some day OpenAI will also answer these kind of questions will tell you at the age of 80 years your life will come to an end. In my case this means I still have 80 - 34 = 46 years to go.

Book summary: The Lonely Century

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 17:06:00 +0100

Do you feel invisible when you’re in the city and everybody just walks by without any eye contact, completely ignoring your existence? Are you already suffering from Zoom fatigue and sick of meeting your colleagues in a virtual environment? Or maybe you’re lucky enough and do have an office but everybody headphones while moving from A to B, signaling (fake) busyness and some sort of “I don’t want to talk to you now.

Releasing Gocial

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 21:40:00 +0100

More than a year ago I started working on a side project born out of the furstration I had with buffer, ifttt and zapier. The use case was pretty simple: I just wanted to share an article and some comments about it on multiple social media platforms from a single location. All sharing services had great functionalities (e.g. automated workflows) Initially I played with RSS and hugo for publishing content via a RSS feed which will then trigger posts on Twitter, LinkedIn & co.

10 years in the InfoSec industry

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 14:36:00 +0100

Ten years ago, in December 2012, I have officially Before that I had several student jobs and internships which at least from most recruiters view don’t count in as professional experience. started my career in the (Information) Security industry. During this period I have done pentesting, code reviews, architecture reviews, software engineering, reverse engineering, consultancy, secure design and probably many other things I cannot remember anymore. I am grateful for what I’ve learned but most important for the lovely people I have met and I’m still in contact with.

Hexagonal Architecture in Python

Mon, 24 Oct 2022 20:11:00 +0200

What do have clean, layered, hexagonal hexagonal, onion architecture and ports & adapters in common? They kind of share the same principles: Separation of concerns (business vs infrastructure code), data encapsulation (information hiding), low coupling, strict dependency flow (how layers should depend on other ones). Still these concepts are not easy to digest unless you put them into practice. Furthermore architectural decisions are figured out based on personal, past experiences and the degree of knowledge people have when discussing viable solutions.

Migrate Tiddlywiki to org-roam - Part 2: org-roam and hugo

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 21:43:00 +0200

In the first part of this series I’ve outlined the main factors for moving my digital garden / braindump / Zettelkasten to org-roam and which factors have facilitated this decision. In the 2nd part I will expand more how I’ve built the new brainfck.org using hugo, ox-hugo and org-roam. Extracting tiddlers from my Tiddlywiki setup was only the first step towards a Second Brain using org-roam. Since I’m a clear advocate for public digital gardens, I didn’t want to keep my notes only for my self.

Book summary: Building a Second Brain

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 20:55:00 +0200

In my previous post I’ve writen about knowledge work and how its output cannot be measured in a linear manner. For knowledge workers information is their most valuable capital, yet everyone is desperately looking for a system to manage the continous influx of information pouring into their brains. We spend a tremendous amount of time managing huge amounts of information and searching for the right piece of knowledge. At the same time we are supposed to work at high standards (fast and continously) and keep up with emerging technologies.

Working in part-time

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 09:03:00 +0200

I’ve recently stumbled over this wired article [1] where the benefits and drawbacks of having a 4-day work week were conclued from scientific research and “experiments” done in the field. Seems like there is a momentum recently as more companies (but also governments) around the world explore the benefits of the 4-day work week: 𝘓𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘴𝘶𝘮𝘮𝘦𝘳, 𝘜𝘚 𝘙𝘦𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘔𝘢𝘳𝘬 𝘛𝘢𝘬𝘢𝘯𝘰 (𝘋-𝘊𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘢) 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘦𝘥 𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘴𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘩𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘬 𝘵𝘰 32 𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘴𝘢𝘤𝘳𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘱𝘢𝘺, 𝘢𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘢 𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘳-𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘬 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘜𝘚 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘊𝘢𝘯𝘢𝘥𝘢 𝘪𝘯 𝘈𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘭.

Migrate Tiddlywiki to org-roam - Part 1: Export Tiddlers

Sat, 03 Sep 2022 22:04:00 +0200

In the first part of this series I’ll outline the main factors why I’ve decided to move my digital garden / braindump / Zettelkasten to org-roam and which factors have facilitated this decision. In the 2nd part (still work in progress) I will expand more how I’ve built the new brainfck.org using hugo, ox-hugo and org-roam. Motivation # I’ve been using Tiddlywiki for almost 10 years now and setup different instances for work, personal stuff and lately as my own personal knowledge management system.

Book summary: Building Microservices (2nd Edition)

Wed, 10 Aug 2022 21:47:00 +0200

Summary # Figure 1: “Building Microservices (2nd edition)” along my notes During my overall IT carreer I came across different architectural design patterns where oppinions differ on the question if they’re the right ones for the problems/challanges teams are dealing with. Before reading this book I was familiar with some of the microservices concepts but it was some article (on modern architectures) that rouse my attention and introduced me to Sam Newman.

TiddlyWiki and Emacs

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 07:00:00 +0200

Since my last post on reddit asking for some help regarding Emacs and TiddlyWikis REST API I gained some elisp knowledge I’d like to share. Maybe you want to go directly to the Emacs configuration. TiddlyWiki 5 # For those of you who haven’t heard of TiddlyWiki yet: TiddlyWiki is a personal wiki and a non-linear notebook for organising and sharing complex information. It is an open-source single page application wiki in the form of a single HTML file that includes CSS, JavaScript, and the content.

RSS/Atom, Emacs and elfeed

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 21:04:00 +0200

In my last post I wrote about RSS/Atom and how these technologies can be used to declutter your digital life and reduce your exposure to the attention economy. Emacs (and all the amazing packages) taught me ORG mode, some basic Elisp and how to be a minimalist and use just one tool for almost everything. Staying up-to-date with current technological trends, Security advisories, blog posts from smart people (and many other things) while not having to subscribe to every single newsletter, led me to elfeed:

RSS and Atom for digital minimalists

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 07:00:00 +0200

Digital Minimalism # A few days after I have started working on this post, I begun reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism book and quickly realized how both topics interrelate to each other. But now one by one: Digital minimalism is a philosophy of technology use in which you focus your entire time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities to strongly support things you value and happily miss out everything else.

Book summary: Breath - The New Science of a Lost Art

Mon, 30 May 2022 21:37:00 +0200

Back in 2017 I remember people sitting together and doing pre-workout breathwork before some trainig session (Calisthenics). At that time I didn’t know what it was nor what it was good for. One year later I was introduced to Pranayama as part of my Yoga teacher training. Right after I’ve read Conscious Breathing but I didn’t really catch fire on the topic. In 2020 I finally came across Wim Hof and realized this was exactly the type of heavy breathing people were exercising 3 years ago.

Book summary: Digital Minimalism

Mon, 02 May 2022 20:48:00 +0200

Figure 1: Digital Minimalism: I’ve started with the audio book but then I ordered a physical copy for further reading. It started with the audio book but soon I’ve realized there is so much valuable content in it I cannot extract by just seeking forward and backward. Finally I’ve ordered a physical copy so I can dedicate even more time digesting the content and putting everything into my personal Zettelkasten.

Presentation as Code

Wed, 19 Jan 2022 20:28:00 +0100

Last year I’ve done some experiments with the Beamer LaTex class which you can use whenever you want to export an ORG document to a Beamer presentation. I’ve done some customizations and I’ve thought I have a quite decent presentation template. Till I’ve found this. That reveal.js presentation completely my mind and I’ve started digging into asciidoc. And then there is also org-asciidoc which will export your ORG buffer into asciidoc.

My 2021 review

Mon, 13 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0100

After last year’s pandemic shock, this year has brought more hope and motivation to people. I’ve felt motivated to learn new things, deep-dive into unknown areas and finally change some things in my life. In this post I’ll share with you my most valued (software) tools, productivity tips, some books worth reading and finally some failure and success with regards to my habits. Health # Wim Hof Method # Last year just before the (pandemic) winter blues was about to begin I’ve had enough of that feeling something you cannot control was already part of my daily life.

Book review: Accelerate - The science of Lean software and DevOps

Wed, 24 Nov 2021 20:24:00 +0100

I always use to say: “Software currently rules the world.” Almost every aspect in our (digital) life has to do with software: The apps you use on your smartphone, the mail/hosting services you rely on, online shopping, train tickets, in general everything that somehow adds value to your life. Competition among organizations is driven by speed, the ability to deliver new features to the customers, stable products, security within their eco-systems and many other aspects.

Bye bye Scout24!

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0200

Bye Bye Scout24! I guess it’s become a tradition to write bye bye posts whenever I switch jobs. So this happens again as I’ve decided to pursue new opportunities elsewhere. I feel sad but also excited at the same time. Working for 5 years for the same company (I do know that’s not thaaaat long) feels like I’ve spent half of my life there. Since 2016 many colleagues have left the company and new ones joined the Security team which I was part of.

Inbox Zero using Getpocket

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0200

After finishing my last post on how to convert getpocket links to epub I was thinking a lot about my current workflow, how I manage to capture everything that might be interesting for me and save it for later use. Saving web articles for later reading is not a big deal but dealing with the amount of saved articles requires some management skills. In this post I’ll share some best practices on how to organize and categorize your (web) articles in a GTD manner: Capture what has your attention, organize your content in buckets and keep an eye on your focus.

HowTo: Convert pocket reader links to Epub and upload to Dropbox

Sun, 15 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0200

Read, organize, archive # I heavily use getpocket to collect articles and save them for later reading. While on my mobile devices I use the official app, on my desktop systems (mostly tmux + Emacs) I use pocket-reader.el quite heavily to collect/organize/archive my list of articles. After my transition from Spacemacs to Doom Emacs I still love evil mode and like to do most of the stuff in normal mode.

Note taking in 2021

Sun, 13 Jun 2021 14:56:00 +0200

[Update 2021-06-22] If you’re more interested in the Tiddlywiki aspect of this post you can also check this Tiddlywiki Google Groups thread. [Update 2021-06-18] This post caught some attention on this Hackernews thread. You might want to check the comments. Based on the recommendations in the thread I’ve put together a list of (digital) solutions (besides the preferred ones) Almost 6 years ago I was blogging about organizing and visualizing knowledge.

Implement an access key rotator

Sun, 25 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0200

Introduction # With the recent success of Github actions you can automate lots of things whenever something in your repos changes, e.g. automatically generate static HTML content (using hugo) and push it to some repository for which GitHub Pages has been configured. Check this awesome actions list for more use cases. Using encrypted secrets defined either per repository or organization, you can bring your Github workflow to the next level: Authenticate against APIs, login to different services while keeping your secrets/credentials away from your repositories.

4 years and 7 days later

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Hello from the other side # If you read this post today you might have noticed there was a huge break since the last post. More than 4 years ago I was actively blogging about security (mostly offensive stuff) and appsec. So what happened since then? Well not only in private some things have changed but also professionally I kind of switched sides. While being involved in pentests for a while I decided to become more blue-team oriented and help others to build secure products.

Some forensics mini-challenge

Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

After reading this excellent article I’ve found this page. If you scroll down you’ll find the Apply section. Not that I wanted to apply for some job but I thought, it’d be challenging to find out the mail address: well, the email address is hidden below. Find the email and send your resume, solution walk-through and desired role. Let’s have a look at the message: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 2c 54 2d f0 0d 2a 08 00 27 c3 59 62 08 00 45 00 01 a1 f3 33 40 00 40 06 bd 8d c0 a8 01 20 68 d2 5d fb 88 90 00 50 c9 c9 77 90 1f e5 d2 bd 50 18 00 e5 8a 29 00 00 50 4f 53 54 20 2f 63 61 72 65 65 72 20 48 54 54 50 2f 31 2e 31 0d 0a 48 6f 73 74 3a 20 77 77 77 2e 65 6c 74 74 61 6d 2e 63 6f 6d 2e 61 75 0d 0a 55 73 65 72 2d 41 67 65 6e 74 3a 20 65 6c 74 74 61 6d 20 72 6f 63 6b 73 21 0d 0a 41 63 63 65 70 74 2d 4c 61 6e 67 75 61 67 65 3a 20 65 6e 2d 55 53 2c 65 6e 3b 71 3d 30 2e 35 0d 0a 41 63 63 65 70 74 2d 45 6e 63 6f 64 69 6e 67 3a 20 67 7a 69 70 2c 20 64 65 66 6c 61 74 65 0d 0a 43 6f 6f 6b 69 65 3a 20 5a 57 31 68 61 57 77 39 4d 47 59 77 59 54 42 6a 4d 47 49 79 4e 54 41 77 4d 44 6b 78 4d 54 45 78 4d 44 51 77 4f 44 52 69 4d 44 59 77 59 54 41 34 4e 47 49 77 4e 44 45 77 0d 0a 43 6f 6e 74 65 6e 74 2d 54 79 70 65 3a 20 61 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74 69 6f 6e 2f 78 2d 77 77 77 2d 66 6f 72 6d 2d 75 72 6c 65 6e 63 6f 64 65 64 0d 0a 43 6f 6e 74 65 6e 74 2d 4c 65 6e 67 74 68 3a 20 38 31 0d 0a 43 6f 6e 6e 65 63 74 69 6f 6e 3a 20 63 6c 6f 73 65 0d 0a 0d 0a 71 3d 54 68 65 2b 65 6d 61 69 6c 2b 61 64 64 72 65 73 73 2b 69 73 2b 68 69 64 64 65 6e 2b 69 6e 2b 74 68 69 73 2b 72 65 71 75 65 73 74 26 62 6f 6e 75 73 3d 57 68 61 74 2b 69 73 2b 73 6f 75 72 63 65 2b 49 50 2b 61 64 64 72 65 73 73 0d 0a 0d 0a 00 Removing all the white spaces leads to:

ringzer0 CTF - Binaries - Introduction to MIPS

Fri, 09 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

References # https://www.cr0.org/paper/mips.elf.external.resolution.txt http://logos.cs.uic.edu/366/notes/mips%20quick%20tutorial.htm

ringzer0 CTF - Binaries - Heap Allocator

Wed, 30 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

First let’s collect some information about the binary itself: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 $ readelf IntelligenSoftware -h ELF Header: Magic: 7f 45 4c 46 02 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 Class: ELF64 Data: 2's complement, little endian Version: 1 (current) OS/ABI: UNIX - System V ABI Version: 0 Type: EXEC (Executable file) Machine: Advanced Micro Devices X86-64 Version: 0x1 Entry point address: 0x400688 Start of program headers: 64 (bytes into file) Start of section headers: 4608 (bytes into file) Flags: 0x0 Size of this header: 64 (bytes) Size of program headers: 56 (bytes) Number of program headers: 9 Size of section headers: 64 (bytes) Number of section headers: 30 Section header string table index: 27 Let’s see some code:

ringzer0 CTF - Binaries - Time to learn x86 ASM and gdb

Tue, 29 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This one was a quite easy one. Using radare let’s find more information about the binary: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 $ r2 -AA 88eb31060c4abd0931878bf7d2dd8c1a [0x08048380]> iI havecode true pic false canary false nx true crypto false va true intrp /lib/ld-linux.so.2 bintype elf class ELF32 lang c arch x86 bits 32 machine Intel 80386 os linux minopsz 1 maxopsz 16 pcalign 0 subsys linux endian little stripped false static false linenum true lsyms true relocs true rpath NONE binsz 7450 Ok, now let’s have a look at the entry point:

ringzer0 CTF - SysAdmin Linux

Sun, 30 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

SysAdmin Part 1 # Let’s login to the machine: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 $ sshpass -p VNZDDLq2x9qXCzVdABbR1HOtz ssh morpheus@for01.ringzer0team.com -p 13375 _ ____ __ _____(_)___ ____ _____ ___ _____/ __ \/ /____ ____ _____ ___ / ___/ / __ \/ __ `/_ / / _ \/ ___/ / / / __/ _ \/ __ `/ __ `__ \ / / / / / / / /_/ / / /_/ __/ / / /_/ / /_/ __/ /_/ / / / / / / /_/ /_/_/ /_/\__, / /___/\___/_/ \____/\__/\___/\__,_/_/ /_/ /_/ /____/ _ _ ___ _____ ___ ___ _ _ | (_)_ _ ___ / __|_ _| __| / _ \ ' \| | | ' \/ -_) | (__ | | | _| \___/_||_|_|_|_||_\___| \___| |_| |_| You have mail.

ringzer0 CTF - JavaScript challenges

Sat, 29 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

These challenges were quite tricky since they didn’t focus only on the JavaScript language itself but also on all kind of stuff you can do with JavaScript: Crypto, obfuscation etc. I think they were a good opportunity to learn more about the language itself and get some ideas how JavaScript obfuscation techniques work. Level 1: Client side validation is bad! # Let’s have a look at the source code: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 // Look's like weak JavaScript auth script :) $(".

Fuzzing the hell out of conntrack tools

Fri, 28 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Fuzzing is nowadays the attack technique used by a lot of pentesters and security researchers. Whether you’re looking for vulnerabilities in media files (pictures, videos, audio stuff) or just binary files, fuzzing is the right approach if you don’t want to do some static code analysis or debug the hell out of your targets. When it comes to fuzzing there are a few tools to mention that have established during the last years.

hack.lu conference 2016

Fri, 21 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This year I’ve attended the hack.lu conference in Luxembourg. Being actually for the first time there, I’ve had absolutely no expectations. In fact it was a really lovelly and warm athmosphere during the whole conference and I’ve met a lot of interesting persons. A nice @hack_lu logo made with the @Level2Lu 3d printer during #hacklu. pic.twitter.com/jFB1wlw5uS — hack_lu (@hack_lu) October 18, 2016 Talks # I think there were some realy good talks.

ringzer0 CTF - Jail Escaping C

Mon, 19 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Here are my solutions for the ringzer0 Jail Escaping C challenges: Level 1: https://ringzer0team.com/challenges/228 Level 2: https://ringzer0team.com/challenges/229 Level 3: https://ringzer0team.com/challenges/230 Level 1 # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 level1@ringzer0team.com's password: Last login: Sun Apr 24 05:48:42 2016 from RingZer0 Team Online CTF C Jail Level 1: Current user is uid=1000(level1) gid=1000(level1) groups=1000(level1) Flag is located at /home/level1/flag.

ringzer0 CTF - Jail Escaping Bash

Mon, 20 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Here are my solutions for the ringzer0 Jail Escaping shell challenges. Level1 # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 evel1@ringzer0team.com's password: RingZer0 Team Online CTF BASH Jail Level 1: Current user is uid=1000(level1) gid=1000(level1) groups=1000(level1) Flag is located at /home/level1/flag.txt Challenge bash code: ----------------------------- while : do echo "Your input:" read input output=`$input` done ----------------------------- You can spawn a shell using:

ringzer0 CTF - Jail Escaping PHP

Mon, 20 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Here are my solutions for the ringzer0 Jail Escaping PHP challenges. Level 1 # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 RingZer0 Team Online CTF PHP Jail Level 1: Current user is uid=1000(level1) gid=1000(level1) groups=1000(level1) Flag is located at /home/level1/flag.txt Challenge PHP code: ----------------------------- <?

Distribute your backups using git-annex

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Backuping a whole bunch of photos and videos might be a difficult task. Taking care of the consistency of your backups is even more complicated task. Besides that you don’t want to have your backups at a single place, thus mitigating the impact of a single point of data loss. I’ve been using git-annex for some years but not like a pro user, rather than “it just works”. Meanwhile I’ve heard of ownCloud and I’ve liked it because one can access its data via web, mobile client or whatever.

The Digital Future in Berlin

Wed, 11 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Like always the obligatory introduction to the event: “The digital age began 75 years ago in Berlin, when Konrad Zuse created the world’s first functioning computer, the Z3. Since then computers have changed the world, much like the steam engine and the car before them. The biggest changes in connection with digitalisation are still to come.” (http://science-match.tagesspiegel.de/the-digital-future) Digital Future? # Well, that sounded like a whole bunch of topics to be presented at the event: Big Data, communication, data analysis, digital society, future computing, gaming, mobility, networks, optimization, privacy, simulation, security, visualization.

AWS Summit in Berlin 2016

Tue, 12 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

For the first time I’ve attended the AWS Summit in Berlin which against my expectations was very interesting. Not having much in common with AWS (at least not yet), from a security perspective the cloud still remains a very neglected threat to companies. As we all know there is some “rain” coming down from the cloud from time to time. And by “rain” I mean sensitive data which gets exposed due to misconfigured APIs, weak credentials or insecure applications.

Chrooting nginx, php-fpm and mysql using Bitnami

Fri, 12 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Having talked about hardening your server using chroot in a previous post I’ve felt that the whole process was way to complicated. I wanted to have a more generic solution regardless of the operating system (and especially the Linux distro). Besides that I wasn’t quite happy changing the systems systemd settings and do several modifications to the already running system. What I wanted to achieve was a closed, portable system of running applications inside a chroot environment.

Bye bye VODKA!

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Nach mehr als 3 Jahren habe ich mich dazu entschloßen, VODKA zu verlassen. Angefangen bei Kabel Deutschland hat mich die Reise im Zuge einer Übernahme zu Vodafone geführt. Der Begriff VODKA selbst (VODafone + KAbel) bedeutete für mich nicht nur das Zusammenführen von zwei Mentalitäten (eigentlich sind es jetzt 3 wenn man Arcor dazu zählt) sondern auch eine gelungene Zusammenarbeit zwischen Rot (Vodafone) und Gelb (Kabel Deutschland). Als AppSec-Spezialist hatte ich das Vergnügen, verschiedene Kabel- als auch Vodafone-Produkte unter die Lupe zu nehmen und mit zur Unternehmssicherheit beizutragen.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

From time to time I like to read about great personalities and how their handling and decisions changed the world. I’m not an Apple fan and I do have something against Apple’s closed platform approach. I also don’t obsessively admire Mr. Jobs and its products, but this book gives you a very good impression how it feeled to work with and for Steve Jobs. Although this is the only book I’ve read about him, I think Mr.

Some words on CSRF and cookies

Tue, 26 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Being involved in different projects where web technologies are used, I have to make sure that AppSec related security nightmares are avoided. One of those security nightmare - and in my own oppinion the most complicated one to explain to a non-sec person - is CSRF. I won’t go into details since these are freely available. Furthermore I would like to focus on the countermeasures one would implement to prevent CSRF.

HowTo: Put nginx and PHP to jail in Debian 8

Fri, 15 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Although I thought this would be an easy task, it turned out that chrooting daemons takes more than copying config files and libraries. There are donzens of tutorials out there how to do it, but the devil lies in detail - as always. Setting up a chroot environment is easy. But securing it properly is prone to faults which in worst case could let an attacker escape the chroot. And this is your worst nightmare, right?

OpenVPN for paranoids

Tue, 17 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Continuing my admin series this time I’d like to setup a VPN using OpenVPN as user-based VPN solution. Unlike IPSec solutions which require IPSec on both (server and client) sides, securing the VPN tunnel by OpenSSL is a more preferable option. In this post I’ll try to show which steps have to be taken in order to: secure the communication channel use up-to-date (and secure!) TLS configurations prevent information leaks when the VPN tunnel is down At least for the last one some additional steps are required to route your traffic only through the VPN tunnel.

Advanced inter VLAN switching using Cisco

Fri, 06 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Continuing my CCNA journey I’d like to address inter VLAN switching in a more detailed way. In this post I’ll configure my previous topology to use VTP and let STP prevent frame looping and other “anomalies” on Layer 2. Updated network topology # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 %%blockdiag # <!

Basic Layer 2 Switching using Cisco Packet Tracer

Wed, 21 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

As a pseudo-preparation for my CCNA exam I wanted to sum up some of the basic configuration steps related to Cisco switches. Although I won’t handle every topic related to Layer 2, I will assume you have already some network knowledge. The main reason for this post is to show how to setup a really small network infrastructure and configure its components. For my purposes I have used Cisco’s Packet Tracer to simulate the network which I highly recommend.

Manage PKI using OpenSSL

Fri, 02 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

For better display results you can also have a look at the Manage a PKI using OpenSSL. In the previous X.509 related post I’ve had a look at the internals of a X.509 certficate. This time I want to setup my own PKI using some open source software. This post is a preparation for setting up a VPN using OpenVPN. Before implementing the PKI let’s have a look what a PKI should definitely include (make sure you have a look at the Wikipedia entry):

Organizing and visualizing knowledge

Thu, 17 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been recently looking for some new ways organizing my notes/thoughts/tasks/bookmarks/whatever in order to keep things clean and backup valuable information. After spending some time reading others efforts to do that, I’ve realized that mine were not that bad. Let me give you some overview how I keep track of bits of information and which tools are best suited for every day tasks. Mind maps # I’ve repeated this one several times: I like visualizing information.

Debugging Android native shared libraries

Wed, 01 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Since I haven’t done this before, I thought I could share some experiences with you. All this began during some APK analysis which was heavily using JNIs. In my particular case Java Native Interfaces were used to call functions inside libraries written in C/C++. At that time I was quite unfamiliar with JNIs and how they actually work. Besides that I haven’t debugged any native applications/libraries on Android before. So this was the perfect opportunity to have a closer look at Android NDK and its debugging features.

Validating and pinning X.509 certificates

Sun, 24 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In times of NSA, surveillance and data privacy, protecting your data has become an essential part of your every day life. A good understanding of basic principles is half the battle. In this post I just wanted to have look at SSL/TLS from a developer point of view but also from an users one. On the one hand I wanted to use openssl as a CLI utility to inspect and validate X.

Adding concurrency to smalisca

Wed, 06 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

When it comes to parallelism Python has some constraints which have to be taken into consideration before starting coding. I think the biggest one has to do with the Global Interpreter Lock which prevents several threads from executing Python bytecodes at once. Nevertheless you may want to apply concurrency patterns to you code in order to achieve more speed. Besides that you may want to use your cores properly otherwise you’ll end up like this:

gethostbyname vs. getaddrinfo

Thu, 30 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

After started coding in C again I’ve had a look at some basic network stuff like: socket(), connect() etc. In order to resolve domain names, one was used to use gethostbyname(). I’ve used this function in all my previous C projects but this one seems to be out-dated as the main page states: The gethostbyname*(), gethostbyaddr*(), herror(), and hstrerror() functions are obsolete. Applications should use getaddrinfo(3), getnameinfo(3), and gai_strerror(3) instead. The really bad thing about gethostbyname is the fact that it doesn’t support IPv6.

Coming back to C/C++ after 2 years

Tue, 21 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

After years of python hacking and all kind of projects (like netgrafio or smalisca) I wanted to do more low-level stuff and refresh my C/C++ skills. I’ll try to describe how it feels like coming back to C/C++ after 2 years of coding abstinence. It’s low.. Very low # Having started a new project I didn’t feel like I’ve forgotten everything. It just felt strange to declare functions and use header files.

usd AG Hacker challenge 2015 - Solutions

Wed, 18 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

usd AG has announced a hacking challenge I have participated at. The target system was available at http://82.195.79.41/. Now let me sum up thg steps that have been required in order to get all 6 tokens. 1 2 3 4 #  import pandas as pd import sqlite3 import binascii Scratch the surface # Let’s first conduct a nmap scan to see which ports are open. 1 2 %%bash nmap -A -T4 82.

The iOS 8.1.3 fiasco

Thu, 26 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

From time to time we all seem to ignore the “voice of reason” and tend to unconsidered actions. This will be a short summary of what could go wrong when one is forced to quick reactions which will result in chaos. All started with an iPad Air. I have jailbroken the device from the very first touch. That time iOS 7.x was installed and a jailbreak was available for that specific version (iOS 7.

GUIfy your Apps using Flask

Thu, 05 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

If you follow this blog, you might have noticed that I’m mainly interested in #infosec, #hacking and so on. The main reason for writing this post was to encourage people to look behind the plate and make their life more enjoyable (and still stay inside their comfort zone :). Ok, “WTF?” you’re probably asking yourself. Let me first start with a more detailed motivation behind this writing. Motivation # Being involved in data analysis on a daily basis, I have to read and modify data in a quick and easy way.

Android Hacker's Handbook

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

What should I say about this book? A lot has been said and this uppon reasonable grounds. This book is meant to give you an overview of the most important security topics related to Android. Not only you’ll get a lot of stuff about Android’s internals, you’ll also learn about exploits (and how they work) targeting the this platform. I think I didn’t have the time (and also the full knowledge) to look at any specific detail this book covers.

A practical guide to Advanced Networking

Thu, 08 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

During the past months I was from time to time reading all kind of stuff related to networking and security. During this process I came accross this book: I found this book to be very comprehensive and very modern in sense of current topics across the “network universe”. If you ever wanted to get a more deep insight in how routers communicate with each other or how to setup a VoIP infrastructure, this book is a must.

2014 - Personal review

Mon, 22 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Well, where should I start? Looking back at my blog archives I’ve realized 2014 “year of the mobile apps” - at least for me. I was heavily involved in analyzing mobile applications: Android and iOS. For the first time in my whole infosec career path I was disassembling iOS applications and doing stuff (binary analysis) I was used to (some years ago). Besides doing a lot of mobile apps analysis, I was pretty much involved in structuring and hacking data.

HowTo: Proxy Non-Proxy-Aware Android Applications through Burp

Tue, 02 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Proxying HTTP(s) traffic from Android devices through Burp should be actually no magic. Nevertheless you’ll have to take some important steps into consideration: Install Burps CA cert on the device I usually access Burp directly and download the cert file (cacert.crt) If Burp is listening on 192.168.1.1:8080, just go to http://192.168.1.1:8080/cert to download the cert Push this file to your device and install the certificate Install ProxyDroid on Android Set proxy setting globally or only for certain applications In theory that’s all!

Using Blockdiag with Pelican and liquid tags

Fri, 21 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

After writing the previous article I thought I should share some Blockdiag plugin for Pelican. You can also check out the pull request. blockdiag # It’s basically a graphviz like utility with its own language (similar to DOT). You can create: block diagrams sequence diagrams activity diagrams network diagrams rack diagrams packet diagrams It can save you a lot of time and has a pretty simple syntax. You can always test your code online using blockdiag’s interactive shell.

Using Graphviz with Pelican and liquid tags

Thu, 13 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I really like keeping things simple. And I also like generating figures from code using Graphviz. And since there was no Graphviz plugin for pelican I wrote my own one. Using liquid tags I wanted to get my graphviz code rendered and automatically included as a base64 encoded image in my HTML code. I’ve created a pull request but you can find a fork at dorneanu-pelican. Basically the tags works as follows:

HowTo: iOS Apps - Static analysis

Wed, 29 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In this short article I’ll try to explain what are the main steps to analyze an iOS app. Since I’ve writen similar posts related to Android I thought I could devote some of spare time writing about the steps required to analyze iOS apps/binaries. But first of all let’s start with: What’s an iOS app? # In a nutshell here are the main characteristics: Objective-C / C / C++ compiled (ARM) executable mostly encrypted using Apple’s Fairplay DRM it runs in a sandbox it’s installed by the user mobile apps come as an IPA file which is the counterpart to Android’s APK Now that you roughly know what an iOS app is let’s have a look at the most common blackbox pentesting tools out there.

Generate all IP addresses from ASN

Wed, 17 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes you need to know if a certain IP (or several ones) are within an IP range or belong to a certain ASN. Let’s give it a try and generate all possible IP addresses for telekom.de. 1 2 3 4 $ dig telekom.de ... telekom.de. 86346 IN A 46.29.100.76 ... Now let’s find out the ASN: 1 2 $ whois 46.29.100.76 | grep origin origin: AS34086 Now ask RIPE for the IP ranges:

HowTo: Androguard with Docker

Fri, 12 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Meanwhile I think I’ve felt in love with Androguard. I love its Pythonic way handling things and its visualizations features. As many of you have noticed, you can run Androguard inside a Docker container. I’ve never used Docker before so it was about time. You can find some general information about the installation process on Arch Linux at this address. Extensions # 1 2 3 4 5 6 # Install extensions # <!

Using JQuery DataTables with IPython

Thu, 28 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I thought this might be interesting enough to share with you. Every time I’m working with DataFrames I somehow miss the search feature: I’d like to search for certain patterns inside the columns and rows. I used to use JQuery DataTables for netgrafio. But I couldn’t find any simple way to integrate it with IPython. Well it was easier than I thought. Extensions # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 # <!

HowTo: Debug Android APKs with Eclipse and DDMS

Thu, 21 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Simply out of necessity I’ve written this mini-tutorial how debug android APKs using Eclipse and DDMS. After hours of wild googling these are the steps to make your APK debuggable under Eclipse. I’ll be using the FakeBanker APK reverse-engineered in previous articles. Revisions # UPDATE 2014-12-09: Before looking at the next steps, make sure you’ll have a look at ADUS. It will help you with the automation of several steps described in this post.

Python for Data Analysis

Wed, 06 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I use Python on daily basis. I love IPython and use it as my main shell for every day tasks. So it was a matter of time until I got captivated by panda, scipy and numpy. I’ve ordered myself Python for Data Analysis in order to get more familiar with the mentioned libraries. Before that I used to semi-understand how their work and got used to that copy&paste mentality. This book is not only about data analysis.

Web Application Survey Tutorial

Wed, 06 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Suppose you get a list of some URLs and you are asked to “investigate” them. The list is full of some random URLs related to your company and nobody knows about. You don’t have a clue who is responsible for them nor which applications (if any) are running behind them. Sounds like a cool task, ugh? Well in today’s post I’ll show you how I’ve managed it to minimize the process of analyzing each URL manually and saved me a lot of time automatizing things.

Android Dynamic Code Analysis - Mastering DroidBox

Tue, 05 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In this article I’ll have a a closer look at DroidBox which provides a mobile sandbox to look at Android applications. In the previous post I’ve dealt with static code analysis. This time will start running our malicious application and look at the “noise” it generates. That would be: file system access network activity interaction with the operating system interaction with other applications etc. DroidBox is very easy to use and consists of an own system image and kernel meant to log one applications activities.

Disect Android APKs like a Pro - Static code analysis

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve started writing this IPython notebook in order to make myself more comfortable with Android and its SDK. Due to some personal interests I thought I could also have a look at the available RE tools and learn more about their pros & cos. In particular I had a closer look at AndroGuard which seems to be good at: Reverse engineering, Malware and goodware analysis of Android applications … and more (ninja !

On Java, OpenSSL, Crypto, Blowfish and stuff

Tue, 01 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

During some Android malware analysis I came along some Java routines which were meant to decrypt/encrypt some content. Nothing special about it. The key had to be extracted from a file and the encrypted file was in Base64. After unsuccessfully trying openssl in order to decrypt the file I decided to make some further investigations. In this article I’ll have a look how Python, Java and openssl (command line utility) implement Blowfish in CBC mode.

WhatsApp bot

Sun, 29 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is what I’ve received yesterday from some phone number I don’t really know. BTW: Which countrys prefix is that? The crazy thing about it: Every time I was sending a message to it, it responded with: Thank you. We have received your message. I had a look at the video sent and it seems to belong to some local club here in town. I was receiving some SPAM SMS from them but this time it was sth new.

Migrate this blog from Octopress to Pelican

Wed, 18 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I’be migrated my whole blog from Wordpress to Octopress. Meanwhile I’ve discovered Pelican which is the Pythonic alternative to Octopress. To be honest: The main reason I’m using Pelican instead of Octopress is the ability to import/include IPython notebooks. After I’ve set up my blog using Octopress I only had a bunge of Markdown files. So let’s get started. Generate metadata for content # 1 2 %%bash cp ~/work/blog/octopress/source/_posts/*.

Googles XSS Game - Solutions

Mon, 02 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

These are my steps how I’ve solved the XSS Game

Level 1 #

This is the most obvious and easiest one. Just insert following code and you’re done:

`1`	`<script>alert(1)</script>`

Level 2 #

Since the script won’t work you’ll have to think of another tags to trigger JavaScript code execution. The first thing which came in mind was to use img tags along with the onerror attributes. Here you go:

`1`	`<img src="http://inexist.ent" onerror="javascript:alert(1)"/>`

BerlinSides 0x05

Tue, 27 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The BerlinSides is a conference from hacker for hacker. This years motto was: …you ain’t listening. All my greetings go to: nullsecurity.net Aluc Universal Hall Team

HowTo: Write pentest reports the easy way

Tue, 20 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I’ll try to share an idea I’ve had regarding pentest reports. Most of you surely have their own methods and tools to create nice looking reports after have done some pentesting. Since I try to keep things simple I’ll give you a rough idea how this could be done without Excel & Co. Scenario # Suppose you conduct a pentest and take notes during it. Afterwards you’ll be probably be copy&paste’integratedP the whole content into a layout or pre-defined document.

HowTo: Create docs with sphinx

Sun, 04 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I’d like to show some handy way to improve your process of documentating your project. Since we all know documentation is a must you might have wondered how to handle that without any big efforts. In fact it would be great if you could write your code along with the documentation and extract it later on for publishing. Meet sphinx # It is a tool that you’ll love!

Unfancy dashboard using matplotlib

Fri, 07 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I was recently playing around with D3Â and discovered its dashboard posibilities. dashboarddude.comÂ has a nice compilation of really fancy dashboards (I was mainly interested in D3 but voila… there are also other ways to do it). Meanwhile I was remembered of old good IPython Notebook and its plotting features. This is what came out (You can find the code also on Github Gist: https://gist.github.com/dorneanu/9407737): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 import datetime as dt import matplotlib.

Links of the Week 27

Fri, 14 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

When Random Isn’t Random Enough: Lessons from an Online Poker Exploit Technical Details Behind a 400Gbps NTP Amplification DDoS Attack Absolute Computatrace revisited Burp Co2 Porting Applications to 64bit ARM Price and Feature Comparison of Web Application Scanners GoLismero 2.0 Beta 3 vulnhub.com faces.io

Links of the Week 26

Fri, 07 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Bitcoins the hard way: Using the raw Bitcoin protocol Modern Processors – A 90min guide The GSM security model Analyzing DarkComet in Memory Cryptography Breakthrough Could Make Software Unhackable Git tips from the trenches I Spent Two Hours Talking With the NSA’s Bigwigs. Here’s What Has Them Mad PRESS RELEASE: IRC NETWORKS UNDER SYSTEMATIC ATTACK FROM GOVERNMENTS Web server for Linux written in amd64 assembly

Links of the Week 25

Fri, 31 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

How I lost my $50,000 Twitter username NSA BIOS Backdoor a.k.a. God Mode Malware Part 1: DEITYBOUNCE Step-by-Step Guide To Decompiling Android Apps Untraceable Blog Continuously jam all wifi clients and access points within range How to Decrypt OpenSSL Sessions using Wireshark and SSL Session Identifiers eduroam WiFi security audit or why it is broken by design Workstation Popcorn: How To Become Uber Productive While Working For Yourself Java-based malware driving DDoS botnet infects Windows, Mac, Linux device

Links of the Week 24

Fri, 24 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Suterusu Rootkit: Inline Kernel Function Hooking on x86 and ARM Oldboot: the first bootkit on Android For the Love of Money Automated penetration testing in the Microsoft stack with OWASP ZAP TCP backdoor 32764 or how we could patch the Internet (or part of it ;)) 2013 Cyber Attacks Statistics (Summary) Decebal: Point-of-Sale Malware - 400 lines of VBScript code from Romania, Researchers warns about evolution of threats and interests to modern retailers

24h Android sniffing using tcpdump

Thu, 23 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

For better display results you can also have a look at the 24h Android Monitoring Jupyter Notebook. Motivation # I’ve started this little project since I was mainly interested in the data my smartphone is ending all the time without my knowledge. I have a bunch of apps installed on my phone and I have absolutely no ideea which (kind of) data is beeing transfered to the Internet all day long.

24h Android sniffing using tcpdump - IPython Notebook Version

Thu, 23 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Motivation # I’ve started this little project since I was mainly interested in the data my smartphone is sending all the time without my knowledge. I have a bunch of apps installed on my phone and I have absolutely no ideea which (kind of) data is beeing transfered to the Internet all day long. I thought I’d be a great ideea to monitor/sniff my data interface (3G, Edge etc. NOT Wifi) for 24h during my normal daily phone usage.

Links of the Week 23

Fri, 17 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

InkTag: Secure Applications on an Untrusted Operating System Unicode Security Guide Hunting Botnets with ZMap EncFS Security Audit Hacking Tools Repository The Hacker Who Cracked the Code in Iron Man and The Social Network Operating System Tutorials The Jobless Ph.D. Generation The Holy Book of Passwords by Aram Bartholl Reconstructing the Cryptanalytic Attack behind the Flame Malware ChewBacca - a new episode of Tor-based Malware Exclusive: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer

Links of the Week 22

Fri, 20 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Remote Code Execution exploit in WordPress 3.5.1 Dissection of Android malware MouaBad.P Linux: Keep An Eye On Your System With Glances Monitor A Forensic Overview of a Linux perlbot DNA seen through the eyes of a coder Infection of biological DNA with digital Computer Code Reversing and Exploiting ARM Binaries: rwthCTF Trafman OpenBSD Exploit mitigation techniques RSA Key Extraction via Low-Bandwidth Acoustic Cryptanalysis

Links of the Week 21

Sun, 15 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Phalanx 2 Revealed: Using Volatility to Analyze an Advanced Linux Rootkit How We Decoded Some Nasty Multi-Level Encoded Malware LAYER 7 DDOS ATTACKS: DETECTION & MITIGATION Bypassing Internet Explorers Anti-Cross Site Scripting Filter On the 1st of January, 1998, Bjarne Stroustrup gave an interview to the IEEE Computer magazine. AnalyzePDF - Bringing the Dirt Up to the Surface The Difference Between Encoding, Encryption, and Hashing

Links of the Week 20

Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Android Root Detection Techniques Shmoocon 2013 Playlist INSECURE Mag 40 A society of phone Zombies Encrypted peer-to-peer web application platform for decentralized, privacy-preserving applications The UNIX system family tree: Research and BSD Found: Hacker server storing two million pilfered passwords Burp/Zap plugin: generator script

Convert IP ranges to list

Wed, 04 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

If you got IP ranges in this layout: x.x.x.1-255, y.y.y.42-120 etc., you could easily use this code to generate full IP adresses without any ranges: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 ips = """ x.x.x.1-23 y.y.y.56-12 """ buf = StringIO.StringIO(ips) while True: line = buf.readline() if line == '': break else: import re m = re.

Links of the Week 19

Fri, 29 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

To kill a centrifuge - A technical anlysis of what Stuxnets creators wanted to achieve Basic data structures and algorithms in the Linux kernel Hackers and software engineers geheimerkrieg.de(also have a look at the Videos) Password cracking: A mega collection of password cracking word lists AES cipher internals in Excel Linux Back Door Uses Covert Communication Protocol New Linux worm targets routers, cameras, Internet of things devices

Links of the Week 18

Fri, 22 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Modern Userland Linux Exploitation Courseware: Also have a look at the presentation slides ELF Carver - Recovering Linux Binaries Catching and Understanding GSM-Signals SIM Card Forensics: An Introduction ZeroNights 2013 Materials exploit-exercises.com Encrypt the Web Report: Who’s Doing What ELF: A Linux executable walkthrough Creating pretty graphs in linux with gnuplot

Links of the Week 17

Mon, 18 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone A Portscan by Email - HTTP Over X.509 Revisited BlackBerry and Windows Google BBS Terminal Top 10 Hacker Movies of all time Duplicity + S3: easy, cheap, encrypted, automated full-disk backups for your servers Botnets of the Web: How to hijack one badBIOS: analysis of Weapong grade Malware

Links of the Week 16

Fri, 08 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Yet Another Android Master Key Bug tmuxp - manage tmux workspaces NSA files: Decoded (really good article) Analysis of an mbr*wserstats and counter.php infected webserver Have fun with Jenkins Commandline forensics of hacked PHP.net

Links of the Week 15

Fri, 01 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Links of the Week 14

Fri, 25 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

FBI Tor Malware Analysis Intro into Reverse Engineering Course Dear undergraduated hacker Penetration Testing Practice Lab / Vulnerable Apps/Systems How Offensive Cyber Security is Changing the Industry

Links of the Week 13

Fri, 18 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

CorkaMix: This is indeed insane! Why We Hate Infographics (And Why You Should) More Thoughts on CPU backdoors: Very briefly What Happens To Our Body After Drinking Coca Cola?: Coke anybody? Kvasir: Network Vulnerability Management System

Links of the Week 12

Fri, 20 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Hackers Courted by Government for Cyber Security Jobs - Rolling Stone We scanned the Internet for port 22 Hosting backdoors in hardware (Ksplice Blog) Distributed systems for fun and profit Analyzing an Android Webview Exploit

HowTo: Automate nmap scanning

Fri, 13 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Recently a colleague of mine at nullsecurity.net released a new scanning tool called wnmap. Basically it’s a wrapper around nmap which helps automating the scanning process by using simple configuration files. Let’s have a look at it.. Configuration # Make sure you you have downloaded the archive and open src/core/wnmap.conf in order to edit: the wnmap path editor preferences global parameters (to use in every scan) Running the tool # Now the obligatory -help message:

Links of the Week 11

Fri, 13 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

nmap NSE hacking for IT security professionals The Wretched Google Interview Experience Why I left Google I Left Google And Lived To Happily Tell About It The NSA’s Cryptographic Capabilities Linux Trojan “Hand of Thief” ungloved You’re Smart. So What? GitHub is Not Your New Resume

Dissecting BlackTiny

Sun, 25 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

To whom it may concern…

Links of the Week 10

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

57 startup lessons Hacking Transcend WiFi SD Cards Hacking the OS X Kernel for Fun and Profiles Here’s what you find when you scan the entire Internet in an hour noteZilla: Interactive,clickable, sheet music Linux x86 Program Start Up (How the heck do we get to main()?) Average Income per Programming Language

Gentoo, systemd, consolekit, udev and some failed system update

Sat, 10 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

OK, first some explanations: systemd is a modern sysvinit & RC replacement for Linux systems. It is supported in Gentoo as an alternate init system. (Source: http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Systemd) ConsoleKit is a framework for defining and tracking users, login sessions, and seats. (Source: http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/ConsoleKit) udev is the device manager for the Linux kernel. Primarily, it manages device nodes in /dev and handles all user space actions when adding/removing devices. Also have a look at eudev a gentoo fork of udev.

Links of the Week 8

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Android Bug 82119321: A comprehensive description of the recent Android bug also known as the signature bug FOOAS: Fuck Of As A Service localtunnel: Access your local web server through the internet [A Tour Inside CloudFlare’s Latest Generation Servers}(http://blog.cloudflare.com/a-tour-inside-cloudflares-latest-generation-servers): Really impressive! Here’s What Wi-Fi Would Look Like If We Could See It Why I left OpenBSD: Remember self interview after leaving NetBSD? Function Hooking Part 1 – Hooking shared library function calls in Linux

Links of the Week 9

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This weeks links…

HowTo: Automate Burp using Burp Extender API

Fri, 02 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I really love Burp. Since I use it on a daily basis I thought there might be some way to automate it. Usually I mainly do these steps to scan some URL: Define scope Start manual exploring OR spider the URL in order to get some target map Activate passive scanning Activate live scanning Wait to the scan to finish Have a look at the results Save/export the results Well these are a lot of steps which have to be done manually.

Links of the week 7

Fri, 12 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Root Cause Analysis Integer Overflows: Nice analysis! Nginx just became the most used web server among the top 1000 websites: Glad to hear that! Hacking Java Bytecode for Programmers (Part4) Krakatau And The Case Of The Integer Overflow: The 4th part is online! This time dealing with integer overflows… Secure website-authentication using GPG keys: Nice idea but lacks of proper secure implementation. Uncovering Android Master Key That Makes 99% of Devices Vulnerable: Sort of link of the week!

HowTo: Root your Kindle 3

Wed, 03 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

As I’m using my Kindle 3 on daily basis I wanted to go behind the limits and check for some new features. As an entry point to the whole topic I highly recommend you K3_Index. This is what I did: Step 1: Jailbreak # Download the files from http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88004. In my case I’ve used update_jailbreak_0.11.N_k3w_install.bin. Copy this file to your Kindle, unplug it from the PC and run: [HOME] -> [MENU] > Settings -> [MENU] > Update YourÂ Kindle.

Links of the Week 6

Fri, 28 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This weeks links: Self interview after leaving the NetBSD board: I still like NetBSD a lot but what Julio writes in his blog makes me feel sad about the whole project. Free Raspberry Pi Hosting: Really interesting idea. I can’t wait to see some day a whole P2P network build upon raspberry pi’s. Google Trends: Get a real-time view on what’s being searched on Google right now. Really impressive! Learn Git Branching: Learn how Git’s branching really works.

Dinge, die ein Informatikerstudent niemals sagen würde

Wed, 26 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Dinge, die ein informatikstudent niemals sagen würde: ich hab sonnenbrand meine freundin… …lass uns das mit pointern lösen yey, ein beweis! ich weiß, warum mein programm funktioniert ich entwickel erst einmal ein ausführliches konzept und denke an alle mölichen fehlerfälle, bevor ich auch nur eine zeile programmiere ich hab windows und office legal gekauft der typ vor mir duftet aber gut heute kommentiere ich ausführlich das internet benötige ich nie zum programmieren wirtschaftsinformatik ist ein völlig gleichwertiger studiengang zu informatik

Links of the Week 5

Fri, 21 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This weeks top links: The most sophisticated Android Trojan: Really nice analysis. I think security on mobile devices will become more and more hype. At our current rate of progress, IPv6 will be fully implemented on May 10, 2148: `There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home. Well.. Not really! Writing buffer overflow exploits - a tutorial for beginners: Another buffer overflow tutorial. Buffer Overflows - Nopsled and Ret2Libc methods: Just excellent!

Links of the Week 4

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

How the Prime Meridian Changed the World: Not technical stuff but worth reading. OpenSSH keys and the drunken bishop: Ever wondered about that visual fingerprint when generating SSH keys? Well this article brings some light on that. I’ve tried on my own and that’s fun: $ ssh -o VisualHostKey=yes victor@cia.gov -p 1337 Host key fingerprint is xxxxx +–[ RSA 2048]—-+ | .. | | . .. | | o .

Links of the Week 3

Fri, 31 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Anatomy of a hack: How crackers ransack passwords like qeadzcwrsfxv1331 This is definetely link of the month! I never had to crack hashes in my life but this article is way the best introduction to the cracking/brute-forcing techniques. This is a must for all crackers out there (Thanks Marcin for the link). Yes, disassemble with Javap ALL OVER THE PLACE! Hacking Java Bytecode for Programmers (Part3): If the site is down check out this link.

Links of the Week 2

Fri, 24 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

First Glimpse into the Soul of Tamagotchi: Remember my post about 29C3? There I’ve first mentioned Natalie and her passion for Tamagotchis. She’s doing some progress! Obvisouly! I really like the screenshots. CVE-2013-2094: This is definitely the bug of the week! Have a closer detailed look here. The exploit was ported to x86. Interview with a BlackHat: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 Your login form posts to HTTPS, but you blew it when you loaded it over HTTP: I can’t believe this is still a issue.

Introducing Links of the Week (LOW) 1

Fri, 17 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A binary analysis, count me if you can: Really impressive skills! See how cracking can be a lot of fun! AttackVector Linux: Combine BackTrack/Kali, TOR and Tails for high anonymity. I liked that one: *Nmap can't UDP via Tor* Skype Big Brother Microsoft is watching you: You should take that into consideration before having your next Skype session. Writing a XSS Worm: Really nice one! Hackersh 0.2 released: You should definitely give it a try!

Hacking Altoro Mutual

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction # AltoroMutual is an vulnerable-by-design web application created by WatchFire (now AppScan Standard) as a demo test application for their BlackBox Scanner. (Source:https://www.owasp.org/index.php/AltoroMutual) The demo can be found at http://demo.testfire.net/. Vulnerabilities # /default.aspx?content= # There is a file inclusion vulnerability which we’ll use for further investigation. URL http://demo.testfire.net/default.aspx?content=../testing.txt will show: 1 2 3 4 5 An Error Has Occurred Summary: Could not find file 'D:downloadsAltoroMutual_v6website esting.txt'. Error Message: System.

OverTheWire: Vortex Level1

Fri, 03 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Solution for http://www.overthewire.org/wargames/vortex/vortex1.shtml. Here’s the code they have used: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 #include #include #include #include #define e(); if(((unsigned int)ptr & 0xff000000)==0xca000000) { setresuid(geteuid(), geteuid(), geteuid()); execlp("/bin/sh", "sh", "-i", NULL); } void print(unsigned char *buf, int len) { int i; printf("[ "); for(i=0; i < len; i++) printf("%x ", buf[i]); printf(" ]\n"); } int main() { unsigned char buf[512]; unsigned char *ptr = buf + (sizeof(buf)/2); unsigned int x; while((x = getchar()) !

OverTheWire: Vortex Level2

Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Solution for level2: Here is the code: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 #include <stdlib.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <sys/types.h> int main(int argc, char **argv) { char *args[] = { "/bin/tar", "cf", "/tmp/ownership.$$.tar", argv[1], argv[2], argv[3] }; execv(args[0], args); } $$ expands to the process ID of the shell. 1 2 $ echo $$ 24489 Let’s make some observations: 1 2 3 4 vortex2@melissa:~$ ls -l /etc/vortex_pass/vortex3 -r-------- 1 vortex3 vortex3 10 2011-11-14 18:15 /etc/vortex_pass/vortex3 vortex2@melissa:~$ ls -l /vortex/vortex2 -r-sr-x--- 1 vortex3 vortex2 7134 2011-11-13 23:07 /vortex/vortex2 The password file is owned by vortex3.

CCC / 29C3

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Description # “The 29th Chaos Communication Congress (29C3) is an annual four-day conference on technology, society and utopia. The Congress offers lectures and workshops on a multitude of topics including (but not limited to) information technology and generally a critical-creative attitude towards technology and the discussion about the effects of technological advances on society. For 29 years, the congress has been organized by the community and appreciates all kinds of participation.

HowTo: Split MP3s by silence detection using mp3splt

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This is probably the most useful command when it comes to splitting large mp3 files. You’ll need mp3splt (http://mp3splt.sourceforge.net) and you’re ready to go: 1 mp3splt -s -p th=-40,min=6,rm Parameters explanation: '-s’: silence mode; activate silence detection '-p’: specify arguments for the silence mode 'th=-40’: threshold level (dB) to be considered silence 'min=6’: minimum number of seconds to be considered as splitpoint 'rm’: remove silence from splitted files Be sure to have a look at the manpage.

HowTo: Have a web performance boost with Nginx

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Why Nginx? # Since I wanted to improve my sites load speed I thought I should look around for some lighttpd-alternatives which I have used for so many years. The really annoying thing about lighttpd is its configuration syntax. I don’t think it’s comprehensive nor easy to learn. Besides that I wanted to have a configuration where memcahed plays a major role: Serve static content (html) from memcache. Lighttpd does have some modules/tutorials how to interact with memcached but I couldn’t find any working configuration.

Need any sh3ll?

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Received from Mr.Sh3ll: hi.my name is saied. if u permit.i want upload shell in ur site for access from another site on this server. i promise dont damage ur site if u accept. send email to me.and i will send u shell and u upload. dont worry WTF?

Add Namecheap Mail account (OX Mail) to Thunderbird

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I thought this could be useful for other Namecheap customers. 'Namecheap’s Open-Xchange servers use only 'secure’ connnections (STARTTLS, SSL/TLS). Supposing domain.com is the domain you have purchased, you’ll have to configure Thunderbird using these settings: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 ; Username : your email address (@domain.com) ; Password : password you have set in the Namecheap configuration menu ; Incoming/outgoing servers : oxmail.

Die stinkenden Informatiker

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Ich musste das veröffentlichen. Ich habe mir gestern einen abgelacht. Lest euch das selber durch: Hallo liebe Studenten, die Tage werden kürzer und auch kälter. Leider haben einige unserer Studenten anscheinend die unschöne Angewohnheit sich nur dann zu waschen, wenn sie merken, dass sie es nötig hätten. Im Gegensatz zu den heißen Sommertagen merkt man das persönlich im Winter natürlich weniger, was jedoch nicht bedeutet, dass es andere im Umfeld nicht bemerken - zum Beispiel durch den leicht beißenden Geruch in vollen Vorlesungs- oder Tutorienveranstaltungen.

Thank God there is iodine! IPv4 over DNS

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I always knew DNS/ICMP traffic is mostly allowed and un-monitored. It was about time to setup some DNS server on my vServer which would allow me to break free! Thanks God there is iodine which allows you to route IP traffic over DNS. I was recently at some cafe and thought it would be a great ideea to test my configuration. I’ve setup the iodine server a few weeks before.This is what I did:

HowTo: Redmine, Lighttpd with Debian

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’ll just post my lighttpd.conf. The rest can be easily found on the Internet. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 $HTTP["host"] =~ "^dev.dornea.nu$" { evhost.path-pattern = "/home/redmine/current/public" server.follow-symlink = "enable" server.indexfiles = ( "dispatch.fcgi" ) server.error-handler-404 = "/dispatch.fcgi" #dir-listing.activate = "enable" url.rewrite-once = ( "^/(.*..+(?!html))$" => "$0", "^/(.*).(.*)" => "$0", ) fastcgi.server = ( ".

HowTo: Keep your passwords safe using SQLite and SQLCipher

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I was recently doing some hacks and realized that there must be a way to store gained information in a secure manner. I usually encrypt sensitive information (like passwords, accounts etc.) using GPG. But that’s quite unhandy: You always need your private key and the encrypted data is stored unencrypted on the device (unless you’re using full disk encryption which shouldn’t be a problem since data is stored encrypted on the device).

HowTo: Convert MTS to MKV using tsMuxeR and ffmpeg

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Since I wasn’t able to find any acceptable Howto, I thought I’d write my own one. Initial situation # I have some videos taken with my Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ10 in AVCHD Lite format (MTS). All I want to do is to convert these files into some more handy format like MKV (Matroska). Demuxing # I’ve used tsMuxeR from SmartLabs to demux the files. Here’s what I did: Now you should have following files on your disk:

Free PPTP VPN servers

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’d recommend you all using some VPN to keep your identity safe and private. Here’s some setup: 1 2 3 4 $ pptpsetup --create vpnde --server pptp.freedevpn.com --username free --password --encrypt $ pptpsetup --create vpnca --server freecavpn.com --username free --password --encrypt $ pptpsetup --create vpnl --server freenlvpn.com --username free --password --encrypt $ pptpsetup --create vpnuk --server freeukvpn.com --username free --password --encrypt For the passwords have a look at freenlvpn.com, freedevpn.com, freeukvpn.

VNC: Connect to current desktop session using x11vnc and ssh

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

x11vnc allows you to connect to real X displays without creating any new X session (fluxbox, twm, gnome etc.). It allows you to control the mouse, keyboard and X events remotely. I usually use it when friends of mine need help and I want to see what exactly they’re doing. Make sure any **ssh server **is running on remote-hostand you have a vnc client installed on your localhost. Also make sure remote-host has x11vnc otherwise this won’t make sense at all.

Block facebook with iptables on OpenWrt

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Say NO to facebook and add these lines to /etc/firewall.user 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 # This file is interpreted as shell script. # Put your custom $IPT rules here, they will # be executed with each firewall (re-)start. IPT=iptables NET_LAN=192.168.0.0/16 ... # facebook $IPT -I FORWARD -p tcp -m iprange --dst-range 66.220.144.0-66.220.159.255 --dport 443 -j DROP $IPT -I FORWARD -p tcp -m iprange --dst-range 69.

OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD - I do love beasts!

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

It all starts with virtualisation! Since there is no BSD at all on my laptop, I thought I should give the most important ones a chance: FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. Although there were several rumours afloat – related to complexity factors (installation, configuration etc.) – I had absolutely no problem setting up *BSD with X11(!!!). Besides that I had a look at the packaging systems provided within each BSD. My conclusion: They are pretty much the same: make install and basta. Here some screenshots:

My own cheap NAS - the OpenWRT way

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Introducing my TP-Link TL-WR1043ND: Summary # OS: Linux OpenWrt 2.6.32.25 #1 Fri Nov 19 20:27:50 PST 2010 mips GNU/Linux CPU: system type : Atheros AR9132 rev 2 machine : TP-LINK TL-WR1043ND processor : 0 cpu model : MIPS 24Kc V7.4 Filesystems # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 root@OpenWrt:~# df -Ph Filesystem Size Used Available Capacity Mounted on /dev/root 2.1M 2.1M 0 100% /rom tmpfs 14.4M 232.0K 14.2M 2% /tmp tmpfs 512.

HowTo: Full-Encrypt data using Gentoo,Luks and initramfs

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Since last post many things have changed. No more NetBSD on my laptop (this has to do with several things, I’ll write about in a future post): I had to fall in love with Gentoo! I’ll try to give you some quick overview related to this posts title: Encryption under Gentoo using Luks. There are serveral (good!) tutorials out there. Among these I’ve used: http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/DM-Crypt_with_LUKS <td> There you'll get a lot of information related to the topic.

Think before you type part 2

Sat, 26 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This is the type of post where I blame myself for my stupidity (I’d call it rather carelessness)What happened? Well all I wanted to do was: 1 $ dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda3 Beware of the “3” at the end. I don’t know what really happened but at the end dd was running with: 1 $ dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda Damn! I was like: “F***! All my data!” Fortunately only 4 MBs were “randomized”.

Stay clean and anonymous with Google Apps

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I was recently reading some documentary article about the Mexican drug war near USA’s national border. Actually it was rather an interview with some guy who fights against the (corrupt) authorities and the drugs leaders by running some informative blog. Feel free to activate your investigative mind and find out which blog I’m talking about… So this guy was clever enough to hide its identity - what would you do in his case ?

OpenBSD 4.8 - First impressions

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Today I had the big opportunity to setup an OpenBSD based gateway. I’ve never used OpenBSD before and I was really excited about. All in one: Really clean (almost spartanic), secure 4.4BSD. Although I had some problems during the partitioning process - I didn’t thought they have such a l33t partitioning tool - the installation went smooth. Afterwards I’ve fetched the ports and installed some common utilities: No compilation errors etc.

Simple memory managment using linked lists (implement my_malloc and my_free)

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Suppose you were a Linux developer and you’re about to implement the well known system calls: malloc and free. How would you start? Which (already implemented) functions would you use? How would you organize your (free) memory? Which information would you like to have about certain memory regions? Those are the minimal problems you’re about to face with. What about memory fragmentation? Speaking of memory: How would you implement this thing called memory?

HowTo: SNAT/IP Masquerade between 2 wlan cards on Linux

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Although this is a quite minimalistic howto you should be able to do IP masquerading between your WLAN cards in less than 2 minutes. As I posted here I’d like to share use my WLAN cards to share one cards Internet connection with the other one. The following steps don’t apply only to wifi cards. The same commands should work on Ethernet cards too. Let’s start… The Big picture # As you see you have 2 networks:

Find out your geolocation via MAC address

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Today I found a very interesting article about geoposition localisation based on MAC addresses. MAC addresses ? Yeah, right! As securiteam described here it is possible to find out your location using Google’s Location Services REST API. Further information can be found on Dinis Cruz blog. But where is all the data coming from? You may also have noticed Google’s Street View cars scanning your neighborhood for WLAN access points. Oh, I have forgotten about that: It wasn’t Google’s intention as stated here.

HowTo: Secure your server using icmpKNOCK

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This time I’d like to give you a short usage description of icmpKNOCK that was recently released. The main reason I wrote it was lack of security measurements on my boxes. I didn’t want any sophisticated IDS tools nor complicated monitoring services. I wanted to implement something which will run on (almost) any platform without any external toolsb. Since the ping utility is available on most modern systems using ICMP packets to communicate with the server was the most reasonable approach.

How to compile Robert you suck ^^

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This is was too funny not to be posted @gutefrage.net: In cause you don’t know, try: 1 gcc -o robert_you_suck robert_you_suck.c

DEADF700? Stuxnet!

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The whole world seems to be concerned about this new worm… I think it was Stuxnet. Meanwhile a (hex?) pattern is putting the cat among the pigeons. Its about DEADF700. What could this be? The word is that it is the last command Stuxnet is waiting for. The last command before what? Before the whole building explodes? Let’s come back to one’s senses. Some translations: Text: ÃžÂp Binary: 11011110 10101101 11110111 00000000 Base64: 3q33AA== DEC / Char: 222 173 247 0 MD2: 19844451167c6038fde316f1a4fadd7d MD4: 864e882437c8324c06d485b3e505ab8d MD5: 06f14a8de09a925e124034e457ce55a2 SHA1: fac6dd07345c0f7f23ab2cf7506bedcf33e4b451 RIPEMD-160: 08edfc88ccd3c2b0187e03bcf8b72894e8fd7908 Sooooo ?

The Ac1db1tch3z exploit and "Robert you suck" thingie

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Yepp.. It’s another one. I’ve tested it on my own laptop and voila: BOOM! Anoher local root exploit is out there. In fact this exploit shouldn’t have been released at all.. An earlier incident was reported in 2007.So why in God’s sake is this malfunction still in the wild? We don’t know it. I’d call it stupidity, if you’re fine with me. L33t hackers like Ac1db1tch3z seem to have antipathy against good security researchers like Ben Hawkes.

icmpKNOCK v0.2 released

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’d like to announce the second main release of icmpKNOCK. I thought it was about time to release a new improved version. I’ve mainly focused on the actions mechanism and tried to implement some flexible way of defining actions, adding key pattern and setting payloads. Besides that I have managed it to install a SVN service in order to provide the latest development version of my current projects. The CHANGELOG for this version isn’t quite long.

Drupals clean urls using Lighttpd: Moved from Lua to rewrite-once

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using Lighttpd + Drupal for a long time. In order to have those sexy clean urls, you’ll have to do some rewrite stuff. A few months ago I found this Lua script, which served its purpose without any complications. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 -- little helper function function file_exists(path) local attr = lighty.

Speed up Drupal by preloading the page cache

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

If you need some technical background, have a look here. The preload cache script I’ve been using for a couple a months: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 #!

Its time to say goodbye! RIP 2010-07!

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Sommersemester 2010 online!

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Ich habe mir die Mühe gemacht, in meinem Studium fÃ¼r ein bisschen Ordnung zu sorgen. Ab sofort sind die Vorlesungsmaterialien sowie die Aufgabenzettel (Lösungen) des letzten Semesters (Sommersemester 2010) online! Solltet ihr geheime Skripte und Aufgabensammlungen bei euch auf der Festplatte aufbewahren, schreibt mir ne Mail. Vielleicht einigen wir uns zu einem Deal und machen das ganze public. Ich werde versuchen, den Stuff aus dem ersten Semester so schnell wie möglich nachzuliefern.

Java? Without Eclipse? Eclim!

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t really like bloated IDEs like Netbeans and Eclipse: Too much functionality, so you might get confused and frustrated. I rather use my one and only friend called vim: C, C++, Python, Assembler … and now Java! What? Yes, it can be a pleasure to code Java in vim. Thanks to eclim your vim gets Eclipse functionality without starting/using Eclipse. In my opinion vim ist the best editor I’ve ever seen.

Bildungsforschung? Rechtschreibung waere besser

Fri, 14 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Birthday paradox/problem

Fri, 07 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In probability theory, the birthday problem, or birthday paradox pertains to the probability that in a set of randomly chosen people some pair of them will have the same birthday. In a group of at least 23 randomly chosen people, there is more than 50% probability that some pair of them will have the same birthday. Such a result is counter-intuitive to many. For 57 or more people, the probability is more than 99%, and it reaches 100% when, ignoring leap-years, the number of people reaches 366 (by the pigeonhole principle).

Torrents over TOR?! Don't!

Mon, 03 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

“An increasing number of people are asking us about the recent paper coming out of Inria in France around Bittorrent and privacy attacks. This post tries to explain the attacks and what they imply. There are three pieces to the attack (or three separate attacks that build on each other, if you prefer).” The first attack is on people who configure their Bittorrent application to proxy their tracker traffic through Tor.

Word lists/dictionaries compilation

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been following securityfocus.com pen-test mailinglist and found some quite usefull links related to word lists/dictionaries. I’ll try to keep the list up2date, so you’re submissions are welcome. http://www.skullsecurity.org/wiki/index.php/Passwords Kevin’s word lists: http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/ http://www.phenoelit-us.org/dpl/dpl.html WPA-PSK Rainbow tables: http://www.renderlab.net/projects/WPA-tables/ OpenWall word list collection: http://www.openwall.com/wordlists/ ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/wordlists/ http://www.wordlistgenerator.net/ http://www.outpost9.com/files/WordLists.html http://www.vulnerabilityassessment.co.uk/passwords.htm http://packetstormsecurity.org/Crackers/wordlists/ http://www.ai.uga.edu/ftplib/natural-language/moby/ http://www.cotse.com/tools/wordlists1.htm http://www.cotse.com/tools/wordlists2.htm http://torrentz.com/search?q=word+list http://www.net-comber.com/wordurls.html http://hashkiller.com/files/downloads/wordlists/

rm -rf / and some kernel panic

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

If you ever had in mind to rm -rf /: DON’T! Even for its funny aspect, it isn’t worth doing such a stupid thing. Well I did it..At least not intentionally. I remember I was going to remove some ordinary directory and then I must have misspelled the last argument (directory name). Luckily I was able to notice the tragedy and cancel the command by ^C. F\***! What should I now?

HowTo: Create new Debian domU using Xen on *BSD

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In this tutorial you’ll get detailed information how to setup a fully functionable Debian Lenny system using virtualization software Xen. This entry was written due to high frustration caused by unreliable/outdated articles on the Internet and uncompleted tutorials. This here should be an attempt to describe the installation process completely and provide additional information which might help you solve common problems. The domU system we’d like to setup (in our case Debian) provides a neat netboot installer which supports Xen.

Inside the mind of a Russian hacker

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

“It’s like when you have a maths problem he said. You’ll have to find the right tools otherwise you’re lost. If you’re able to understand the problem, then `use that knowledge in the future.” This simple comparison applies to hacking, at least to that one that is used to be practiced in Russia. Even Mr. Kaspersky admits that most sophisticated attacks have their origin in his own country. Russian hacking attacks seem to be more professional, the malware design more complicated and technical.

HowTo: Qemu networking on NetBSD

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In this tutorial I’d like to give you some useful examples how to configure network when using Qemu as virtualization machine. The videos in this HowTo were taken on a NetBSD-5_STABLE/amd64 machine using Qemu 0.11.1. **Attention: **On my system I’ve used a patched version of Qemu as reported here. However you can use the fd= option to specify an open socket to be used. Example: 1 $ qemu -cdrom [iso file] -net nic -net tap,fd=3 3<>/dev/tap0 Using this example `tap0″ should be created before the qemu command.

Attacking Trusted Platform Module (TPM)

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

For those of who believe that using authenticated boot features such as TPM should protect you against hackers… : WRONG! In their latest project some guys from Frauenhofer SIT (Security Test Lab) have managed to conduct a quite realistic attack against a Windows machine with BitLocker, the disk encryption functionality in most recent Windows versions. As stated here there is a video which demonstrates a proof-of-concept implementation of such an attack.

Pidgin stores account data in plaintext!

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I was just looking for some configuration files in Pidgins working directory ~/.purple/ and found this: 1 2 3 ... -rw------- 1 victor users 22939 Nov 23 19:34 accounts.xml ... Well I wouldn’t have payed to much attention at that file, if it had not contained this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 $ head accounts.xml <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' ?> <account version='1.0'> <account> <protocol>prpl-msn</protocol> <name>******@hotmail.

NetBSD, Linux, Xen - Does it work?

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In this article I’d like to share my impressions I made with Xen during the last weeks. I met Xen a few months ago but due to general lack of interest I didn’t have the chance to give it a try.Para-virtualization - why bother at all? There were actually no significant reasons why I should use virtualization. But then it started with this thread, followed by this one. The really fascinating - and tough quite useful - aspect of virtualization consists of the hardware access policy which is implemented by the virtualization host.

Simple MAC address generator

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Any time you do some security researches you should better spoof/hide your identity. The best way to do that is to spoof/manipulate the MAC address of your interface. I normally do that when doing WiFi stuff: WEP cracking and such stuff. I usually assign some random MAC address to my interfaces to fully hide my identity. A MAC address consists of six groups of hexadecimal digits. Each group is separated by hyphens or colons.

Some Drupal peculiarities

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Add Lightbox2 functionalities to WYSIWYG editor TinyMCE - who thought this would cost me about 6 hours of work? In fact that was the easiest part: I just followed the instructions on http://drupal.org/node/252153 and everything worked well! Before being able to do that, some upgrades were necessary. On http://drupal.org/project/tinymce I was told that the module was deprecated and replaced by the Wysiwyg API. So I had to remove the old TinyMCE module, install the new one and add at least one editor library as described on http://drupal.

Keep your system up2date!

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Due to NetBSD’s great packaging system, software gets updated very frequently. It is very important to have a clean and safe system running and no outdated packages on your system. They might be vulnerable to recently discovered bugs and affect your systems’s security and performance. After updating the package tree (see documentation), I usually update my whole system by running: 1 $ pkg_chk -su Actually there is nothing wrong about that.

NetBSD, kernel downgrade and some voodoo!

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t know if you still remember my ACPI suspend/resume problems a few months ago. I once suspended my Linux system to RAM and forgotten to make a proper shutdown. After a while the battery discharged and my laptop was out of power. After some reboots (there were about 15 tries) I finally managed it to boot my system again. Some BIOS error occured every time. That error still keeps my busy.

FU here I come!

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Hiermit möchte ich verkünden, dass meine Wahl auf die FU Berlin fiel. Welche Wahl? Na die UNI-Wahl! Nächste Woche gehts dann los mit der Immatrikulation, im Oktober mit dem Studium. Das Vorlesungsverzeichnis schaut schon mal gut aus. Ich freu mich auf jeden Fall!

HowTo: SSH-Tunnel over CorkScrew using Tor

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Nowadays it seems like we’re loosing our privacy and are being taped by video cameras all over. The same applies to Internet surveillance: By daily traffic analysis you can find out who is talking to whom over a public network. This traffic allows others to track your click behaviour and interests. So if any mailicious guy has access to your network traffic (@work, @home …) he will try to find more information about you, like e.

icmpKNOCK - ICMP port knocking server

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Whats this about? # If you’re familiar with port knocking, you should know the basics and how this technique basically works. If don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, feel free to have a look at the Links section. Most port knocking tools are listening for TCP or UDP packets to arrive on specific ports in a specific order. icmpKNOCK is waiting for ICMP echo requests and checks their payloads.

CoWPAtty 4.2 for NetBSD

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

From http://wirelessdefence.org/Contents/coWPAttyMain.htm: coWPAtty is designed to audit the pre-shared key (PSK) selection for WPA networks based on the TKIP protocol. - Joshua Wright. Since I had problems installing/compiling cowpatty, I had to modify the Makefile and several include-lines in some files. Currently I’m using NetBSD/Amd64. Feel free to modify the files at your needs. Download here! Edit: As stated here, there is a newer version, 4.3. I edited the Makefile and created a new tarball.

Ganxtaville52 Luebecker Hood

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Lieber Victor, wir wollen dir eine ganz besondere Ehre zu Teil kommen lassen und dir unseren offiziellen WG-Blog vorstellen: http://www.ganxtaville52.blogspot.com/ Es ist etwas wirklich wertvolles, also teile diese festgehaltenen Momente auch nur mit Menschen, die dir wirklich nahe stehen und dir etwas bedeuten. Viel Spaß dabei, um Kommentare, Anregungen usw. wird gebeten. Beste Grüße, Paul aus der Lübecker Str. ALSO LEUTE: Geht auf ganxtaville52.blogspot.com!!!

HowTo: RsynCrypto - The backup jewel

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Nowadays it is essential to backup your data and keep it safe in case of a data loss event. The most common way to backup (private) data is to use a remote server where you can upload your data. Certainly you want to keep it safe and private So how do you want to guarantee the privacy of the files stored? Upload it to the server and encrypt it afterwards?! Somehow you want to automate this backup process so you don’t have to do nothing than running the backup script.

OverTheWire: Vortex Level0

Thu, 21 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

So what’s this whole thing about? “The wargames offered by the OverTheWire community can help you to learn and practice security concepts in the form of funfilled games.” by OverTheWire.org. So I started with Vortex and coded an example how to read 4 integers from server, sum them up, send result to server and get the login information back from server again. Sounds quite simple. I admit I had to refresh my knowledge about linux socket programming and go through some coding examples.

Der Buschfunk kommt

Thu, 07 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Wozu denn die ganze Aufregung über das neue Feature von StudiVZ? Der Name mag ja einen total verwirren, hat aber nichts mit mittelafrikanischer Kommunikationskultur zu tun. Micro-Blogging nennt sich das Ganze und soll zum einen die User darüber informieren, was in ihrer Nähe (gemeint sind ihre Kontakte bei VZ) alles passiert (ist) und zum anderen ihnen die Möglichkeit bieten, ihre Freunde auf dem Laufenden zu Halten. “Ich bin einkaufen!” “Ich lerne wie ein Weltmeister…”

NetBSD rulez!

Tue, 05 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I just started installing NetBSD on my 2nd laptop. Everything works like a charm! (thanks L. for your support xD) I was kind of sick of Linux/Debian and wanted to try something new. I made my decision and installed NetBSD due to its high portability: “Of course it runs NetBSD!” I heard Thinkpads are very well supported by NetBSD but I need to accomodate to the new system and do some testings before installing it on my main working machine.

Turn VIM into your favourite IDE

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Before you start reading this I’d recommand you to ask your best friend Google™ for the most common (platform independent) IDEs (Integrated Development Environment). If you want some top 10 of most featured/used/known/whatever IDEs go to Wikipedia and satisfy your needs. So don’t get me wrong: This article is NOT supposed to give you some comparison nor to influence your oppinion. I’ll just satisfy MY needs and give you some kind of reviews in using VIM for complex projects and daily coding tasks.

Why use Python? The n00b mini-review

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been coding Python for almost one week. I really thank O’Reilly for their good quality and well structured books. If you ever plan to learn Python, just have a look at “Learning Python - 3rd Edition” by Mark Lutz. You’ll love it! And you’ll really get impressed and fascinated by Pythons vast functionalities like I did. So what’s the big thing about Python? Well to be honest my answer is simply: Because it’s damn cool.

HowTo: Get SETOF from Array in PostgreSQL

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The use of so called “procedural languages” in PostgreSQL allows the user to write user-defined functions in other languages than SQL or C. Since every query is sent to the server, the database server has to know how to interpret and handle function statements. As the PostgreSQL documentation describes, the function handler itself is a C language function compiled into a shared object and loaded on demand. All you have to do is to install the language into your database.

Bye Bye Immobilo!

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Wow! So schnell kann die Zeit vergehen…Vor ungefähr 5 Monaten wurde ein gewisser Victor D. in die Büroräume der Firma Golden Immobilien GmbH eingeladen. Grund dafür war ein anstehendes Vorstellungsgespräch. Damals wusste ich noch nicht, welche Herausforderungen mich im Laufe des Praktikums erwarten werden und welch Bereicherung meines Fachwissens noch bevorstand. Aufgaben # Die richtige Bezeichnung meiner Stelle lautete Datenbank-Entwickler. Zu meinen Aufgabenbereichen gehörte überwiegend die Entwicklung neuer (Datenbank)-Funktionen/Funktionalitäten für die Immobilien Suchmaschine immobilo.

Mod2Exec - Execute modules

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Einleitung # Wir leben in einer Zeit, in der Dynamik sowie Flexibilität eine große Rolle spielen. Wir alle besitzen bestimmte Fähigkeiten, die in bestimmten Situationen zum Einsatz kommen können. Das heißt, der Mensch braucht diese nur zur richtigen Zeit „aufzurufen“. Genauso soll ein Kernel, das Herzstück eines Betriebssystems, auch funktionieren: Die aktuelle Systemkonfiguration wird überprüft und Module werden hochgeladen. Damit werden dem Kernel Schnittstellen zur Verfügung gestellt, die zur Steuerung der Hardware etc.

Viral Infections on Linux

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Einleitung # Wir leben in einem digitalen Zeitalter, in dem sich Technologien rasch weiterentwickeln und deren Präsenz für uns Menschen eine immer größer werdende Rolle spielt. Gleichzeitig erfahren wir eine Zunahme der Computer-Kriminalität, geprägt von mafiösen Strukturen, die sich zum Ziel gesetzt haben, Informationen im Eigeninteresse zu sammeln. Die Wichtigkeit dieser Informationen variiert je nach Art des Angriffs und reicht von der IP-Adresse des Nutzers bis zur Kreditkarten- oder Versicherungsnummer.