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WordPress Multisite on the Darknet (Mercator .onion alias)
Continuous Documentation: Hosting Read the Docs on GitHub Pages (2/2)
Nightmare on Lemmy Street (A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story)
Trusted Boot (Anti-Evil-Maid, Heads, and PureBoot)
Hardening Guide for phpList
Crowdfunding on Crowd Supply (Review of my experience)
WordPress Profiling with XHProf (Debugging & Optimizing Speed)
Detecting (Malicious) Unicode in GitHub PRs
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Bypassing Check Point firewall DPI Tor-blocking

This article will describe how to bypass censorship from within any network that uses firewalls using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) built by the Israeli software company Check Point Software Technologies Ltd, such as is being used by the Miami-Dade's Public Library System to censor on their public wifi.

I've been very fortunate to live in a country where freedom of speech is a well-protected human right and censorship is generally unaccepted. But, I've long been aware that many States prefer to assert their control over their citizens by controlling their available information. One of the shining achievements from the Tor Project is a system that allows these unfortunate souls to be able to bypass these censors and access the unfettered Internet. Indeed, the UN affirmed that a State's attempt to prevent or disrupt dissemination of information online is a violation of international human rights law, as defined by article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Of course, many States today continue to ban access to the Tor network. In response, Tor provided hidden entry-points called bridge relays that are harder to block. In response to Tor bridges, States purchased firewalls from companies like Check Point to analyze the
. . . → Read More: Bypassing Check Point firewall DPI Tor-blocking

HPKP Best Practices for Let's Encrypt

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


. . . → Read More: HPKP Best Practices for Let's Encrypt

Let's Encrypt!

Finally, this website is (only) accessible over https!

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael

tech.michaelaltfield.net/

Eavesdropping Analysis of PGP Metadata

This post attempts to answer the following question: If an evesdropper intercepts a message encrypted with gpg, how much information will they be able to extract from the message without a decryption key?

I will show the unencrypted metadata added to a GPG-encypted message, and I will present commands that can be used to extract this unencrypted metadata.

Michael Altfield

Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡

About Michael


. . . → Read More: Eavesdropping Analysis of PGP Metadata

Iterative MITM Packet Sniffer

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


. . . → Read More: Iterative MITM Packet Sniffer