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Featured Articles           Today I discovered how to validate the Public Key Algorithm that’s used for a given gpg key. Unfortunately, it’s extremely unintuitive & took quite a bit of digging to figure out how. So I’m leaving this here in hopes it helps someone in their future searches. Michael Altfield Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡ About Michael This post describes how to generate a few backup public key hashes to add to your HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKP) config that might save you from bricking your domain if Let’s Encrypt ever gets untrusted like StartCom did. If you have a healthy distrust of the X.509 PKI trust model, then you’ve probably heard of HPKP (and probably also HSTS & CAA). Website certificate pinning was a trend first started by google, who hard-coded a pin of their certificates in their Chrome browser. Eventually, google helped build a more standardized pinning method under RFC 7469. And today, it’s supported by Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. Pinning is a great TOFU improvement to https, but–if misconfigured–you could “brick” your domain–making it so that your client’s browsers will refuse to let them access your site for months or years (interestingly, this has also caused some security experts to think of how HPKP could be abused in ransom-ware). Therefore, it’s a good idea to follow a few HPKP Best Practices. Michael Altfield Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡ About Michael This post will describe how to route outgoing traffic in a python script running on TAILS first through Tor, then through a SOCKS proxy created with an ssh tunnel. This is helpful when you want to use the anonymizing capabilities of tor, but you need to access a website that explicitly blocks tor exit nodes (common with sites running CloudFlare on default settings). Michael Altfield Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡ About Michael This article describes the correct way to use pycurl over Tor, such that both DNS lookup data and HTTP(S) traffic is sent through Tor’s SOCKS5 proxy. If you google “pycurl tor”, one of the first results is a stackoverflow post that describes how to configure pycurl using the pycurl.PROXYTYPE_SOCKS5 setting. Indeed, even the tutorial To Russia With Love on the Tor Project’s Official Website describes how to pass pycurl through Tor using the pycurl.PROXYTYPE_SOCKS5 setting. However, using pycurl.PROXYTYPE_SOCKS5 will leak DNS queries associated with your HTTP requests outside of the Tor network! Instead you should use pycurl.PROXYTYPE_SOCKS5_HOSTNAME. The –socks5-hostname argument was added to libcurl v7.26.0. The pycurl.PROXYTYPE_SOCKS5_HOSTNAME argument wasn’t added to pycurl until pycurl v7.19.5.1, which (at the time of writing) was less than 2 months ago! This article will describe how to install pycurl v7.19.5.1 onto the latest version of TAILS at the time of writing, which is TAILS v1.2.3. Michael Altfield Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡ About Michael Your browser aggrigates a *lot* of data about your computer, and it won’t hesitate to provide all of this data to a nosy web site. In fact, if a website requests a large dataset of your computer’s configuration, concatinates it together, and passes it through a hash function, the resulting hash can be farily unique. This procedure can be done (and is done) on seperate websites to track users and their activity across multiple websites. If the same procedure [get data, concatenate, hash()] produces the same hash value when done on 2 seperate websites, the website can be fairly certain that you’re the same user. This technique for tracking users is known as Browser Fingerprinting. Just to get an idea of how effective this is, here’s an excerpt from the above-linked article: [The EFF] found that, over their study of around 1 million visits to their study website, 83.6% of the browsers seen had a unique fingerprint; among those with Flash or Java enabled, 94.2%. This does not include cookies! You can test the uniqueness of your browser’s “fingerprint” using this handy EFF tool. There is a really great document descirbing techniques that could be used to prevent With each passing day, it’s becoming more and more obvious that Internet users are transitioning to cloud-based storage. Between (1) My home workstation running Arch Linux, (2) my laptop dual-booting in Ubuntu Linux and Windows 7, (3) my netbook running eeebuntu, and (4), public-access PCs at my University, I need a way to open the latest version of our files from any geographic location on any OS. A few years ago I built a multi-TB storage solution which hosted my personal, online Subversion repository. But power is expensive, so this box ended up getting turned off. In response, I fell into the bad habit of storing my source code merely as files on the cloud without version control. Several years ago (assuming your file was small enough) this meant emailing an attachment. Or, more recently, uploading it to Google Docs. Then people started using DropBox. Finally, if you cared about the privacy of your data, you moved to Wuala. But Wuala tends to corrupt my files as I’m editing them in gvim, so I started storing my files locally again–which rocked the boat and convinced me to finally get around to learning git. Git has always been on my to-try For my Discrete Mathematics II course at UCF (COT4210), I had to do some implementation with Finite State Machines. My favorite of our tasks (though the most difficult) was to convert a Regular Expression (RE) to an equivalent Deterministic Finite Automata (DFA). And since our professor let us use any language, I tried to branch out from Java & C (which are annoyingly overused in Academia). I decided to teach myself Python. And it turns out, it was a good choice too–considering it’s wonderful built-in functionality for Lists, and the heart of this program is a huge 2D array defining the automata’s transition function. Also, I miss scripting languages–especially when I’m writing a program as a learning experiment as opposed to trying to make it as efficient as possible. So, without further Ado: here’s my code. It reads a RE in postfix notation from input.txt. Two cautions about postfix REs: You must explicitly state concatenation The Kleen Star is already a postfix operator in REs, so it doesn’t really work to use a mathematical infix2postfix library, as it treats the kleen star like an infix multiplicative operator. I treat it as an operand and throw it directly into the I’ve got a hellacious project due and finals all next week, but this was just too much fun to pass up. In any case, compiler optimization increases compile time, and anything that gives me more time to sword fight on $1000 office chairs is worth a little R&D. I’m working on writing this cut-down MIPS processor simulator for my Computer Organization class at UCF. I googled “word alignments” to help me better understand the most efficient calculations for converting the Byte Aligned Program Counter address to the Word Aligned Memory array when I ran across an interesting article showing that the mere *order* of variable declarations in a C program can affect the amount of memory used by that program. The article explained the situation very well, and it makes sense why this issue would happen, but I was surprised that the compiler wouldn’t try to optimize situations like this by re-ordering a set of concurrent variable declarations of alternating data types. In any case, I continued to hack away at my project when I began to think about whether or not gcc translates multiplication and division operations where one of the operands is a power of 2 into simple So, I got into a discussion with a friend of mine in my Computer Security class at UCF about this script. I’m posting this for historical and educational purposes only. As always, I never condone the implementation of any of my content for malicious intent. Moreover, this script has flaws that * would make it useless in such a scenario. Don’t do it! Here’s a script I hacked up last semester when I was playing with MITM attacks and packet eavesdropping with ettercap:. This scripts will automatically: fake its MAC Address get a new IP Address collect a list of hosts on the same subnet as itself iterate through and ARP poison: each of these hosts one at a time for 5 minutes each save all data collected in host-specific files in a timestamped directory repeat until the hard drive is full Michael Altfield Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡ About Michael I really should be studying for my stat exam tomorrow, but I was logging into my.ucf to download my lecture notes, and while Blackboard Learning System (the really shitty replacement for WebCT) was stuck in an infinite loading loop (most probably caused by incompetent javascript) I decided to finally get Google Chromium (which apparently has an excellent javascript engine) working on my Sabayon Linux desktop. Michael Altfield Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡ About Michael |
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