c0d3 :: j0rg3

Recently I decided that I wanted my blog to be available inside of the Deep, Dark Onion (Tor).

First time around, I set up a proxy that I modified to access only the clear web version of the blog and to avail that inside Tor as a ‘hidden service’.

My blog is hosted on equipment provided by the kind folk at insomnia247.nl and I found that, within a week or so, the address of my proxy was blocked. It’s safe for us to assume that it was simply because of the outrageous popularity it received inside Tor.

By “safe for us to assume” I mean that it is highly probable that no significant harm would come from making that assumption. It would not be a correct assumption, though.

What’s more true is that within Tor things are pretty durn anonymous. Your logs will show Tor traffic coming from 127.0.0.1 only. This is a great situation for parties that would like to scan sites repeatedly looking for vulnerabilities — because you can’t block them. They can scan your site over and over and over. And the more features you have (e.g., comments, searches, any form of user input), the more attack vectors are plausible.

So why not scan endlessly? They do. Every minute of every hour.

Since insomnia247 is a provider of free shells, it is incredibly reasonable that they don’t want to take the hit for that volume of traffic. They’re providing this service to untold numbers of other users, blogs and projects.

For that reason, I decided to set up a dedicated mirror.

Works like this: my blog lives here. I have a machine at home which uses rsync to make a local copy of this blog. Immediately thereafter it rsyncs any newly gotten data up to the mirror in onionland.

After consideration, I realized that this was also a better choice just in case there is something exploitable in my blog. Instead of even risking the possibility that an attacker could get access to insomnia247, they can only get to my completely disposable VPS which has hardly anything on it except this blog and a few scripts to which I’ve already opened the source code.

I’ve not finished combing through but I’ve taken efforts to ensure it doesn’t link back to clear web. To be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Tor users will only appear as the IP address of their exit node and should still remain anonymous. To me, it’s just onion etiquette. You let the end-user decide when they want to step outside.

To that end, the Tor mirror does not have the buttons to share to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus.

That being said, if you’re a lurker of those Internet back-alleys then you can find the mirror at: http://aacnshdurq6ihmcs.onion

Happy hacking, friends!

Hello friends.

While the overall telos of this blog is to, generally speaking, convey code snippets and inspire the personal projects of others, today we’re going to do something a smidgeon different.

This will be a layman’s look at varied dimensions of information security from a comfortable distance. Over the years, I’ve secured servers, operating systems, medical data, networks, communications and I’ve unsecured many of these same things. The topics are too sprawling to be covered in a quick summary — but let’s find a point of entry.

Those of us who are passionate about information security are well aware of how daunting is the situation. For newcomers, it sometimes seems rather impossible. Pick any subject and there are probably well-informed and convincing experts in diametric equidistance from any “happy medium”.

Let’s imagine that (like most of us) you don’t have anything spectacular to protect. However, you dislike the idea of our ever-dissolving privacy. Therefore you want to encrypt communications. Maybe you begin to use Signal. However, there are criticisms that there is a “backdoor” (there is not). Further, there are accusations that open source projects are coded by those who can’t get real jobs. Conversely, open source projects are widely open for peer review. If it worries one enough they are free to review code themselves.

PGP can encrypt content but concerns surround algorithmic selections. Some are worried about metadata crumbs. Of course, there’s nothing preventing the frequent switching of keys and email addresses. You could use BitMessage, any number of chat solutions or drop at paste bins.

Let’s leave those concerns aside for when you’ve figured out what you’re intending to protect. These arguments surround any subject in information security and we’re not going to investigate them on a case by case basis. Least, not in this post.

At the coarsest granularity, the question is analogous to the practicality of locking your doors or sealing your post envelopes. Should I take measures toward privacy?

My opinion is rather predictable: of course you should!

There’s a very pragmatic explanation. If there ever comes a day when you should like to communicate privately, that’s a terrible time to start learning.

Take the easy road and start using some of the myriad tools and services available.

Should you decide to take InfoSec seriously, you’ll need to define a threat model.
That is: What am I protecting? From whom am I protecting? (e.g. what are probable attack vectors?)

That’s where you need to make choices about trusting products, protocols, methods, algorithms, companies, servers, et cet. Those are all exciting subjects to explore but all too often brushing up against them can be exasperating and cause premature burn-out.

That in mind, let’s employ the philosophy that any effort toward security is better than none and take a look at a few points where one might get wetted-toes.

If you have questions or want specific advice, there are several ways below to initiate a secure conversation with me.

Secure your browser:

Secure communications:

Explore alternate nets (e.g., Deep Web, Dark Net):

Have fun and compute safely!

Seems I’ve always just a few more things going on than I can comfortably handle. One of those is an innocent little server holding the beginnings of a new project.

If you expose a server to the Internet, very quickly your ports are getting scanned and tested. If you’ve an SSH server, there are going to be attempts to login as ‘root’ which is why it is ubiquitously advised that you disable root login. Also why many advise against allowing passwords at all.

We could talk for days about improvements; it’s usually not difficult to introduce some form of two-factor authentication (2FA) for sensitive points of entry such as SSH. You can install monitoring software like Logwatch which can summarize important points from your logs, such as: who has logged via SSH, how many times root was used, etc.

DenyHosts works primarily with SSH and asks very little from you in way of configuration, especially if you’re using a package manager to install a version that is configured for the distribution on which you’re working. If you’re installing from source you may need to find where are your SSH logs (e.g., /var/log/secure, /var/log/auth.log). It’s extremely easy to set up DenyHosts to synchronize so that you’re automatically blocking widely-known offenders whether or not they’re after your server.

In contrast, Fail2ban is going to take more work to get set up. However, it is extremely configurable and works with any log file you point it toward which means that it can watch anything (e.g., FTP, web traffic, mail traffic). You define your own jails which means you can ban problematic IP addresses according to preference. Ban bad HTTP attempts from HTTP only or stick their noses in the virtual corner and don’t accept any traffic from them until they’ve served their time-out by completely disallowing their traffic. You can even use Fail2ban to scan its own logs, so repeating offenders can be locked out for longer.

Today we’re going to assume that you’ve a new server that shouldn’t be seeing any traffic except from you and any others involved in the project. In that case, you probably want to block traffic pretty aggressively. If you’ve physical access to the server (or the ability to work with staff at the datacenter) then it’s better to err in the direction of accidentally blocking good guys than trying to be overly fault-tolerant.

The server we’re working on today is a Debian Wheezy system. It has become a common misconception that Ubuntu and Debian are, intents and purposes, interchangeable. They’re similar in many respects and Ubuntu is great preparation for using Debian but they are not the same. The differences, I think, won’t matter for this exercise but I am unsure because this was written using Wheezy.

Several minutes after bringing my new server online, I started seeing noise in the logs. I was still getting set up and really didn’t want to stop and take protective measures but there’s no point in securing a server after its been compromised. The default Fail2ban configuration was too forgiving for my use. It was scanning for 10 minutes and banning for 10 minutes. Since only a few people should be accessing this server, there’s no reason for anyone to be trying a different password every 15 minutes (for hours).

I found a ‘close-enough’ script and modified it. Here, we’ll deal with a simplified version.

First, lets create a name for these ne’er-do-wells in iptables:
iptables -N bad_traffic

For this one, we’ll use Perl. We’ll look at our Apache log files to find people sniffing ‘round and we’ll block their traffic. Specifically, we’re going to check Apache’s ‘error.log’ for the phrases ‘File does not exist’ and ‘client denied by server configuration’ and block people causing those errors. This would be excessive for servers intended to serve the general populace. For a personal project, it works just fine as a ‘DO NOT DISTURB’ sign.

That gives us some great, utterly unforgiving, blockage. Looking at the IP addresses attempting to pry, I noticed that most of them were on at least one of the popular block-lists.

So let’s make use of some of those block-lists! I found a program intended to apply those lists locally but, of course, it didn’t work for me. Here’s a similar program; this one will use ipset for managing the block-list though only minor changes would be needed to use iptables as above:

#!/bin/bash
IP_TMP=ip.tmp
IP_BLACKLIST_TMP=ip-blacklist.tmp

IP_BLACKLIST=ip-blacklist.conf

WIZ_LISTS="chinese nigerian russian lacnic exploited-servers"

BLACKLISTS=(
"http://danger.rulez.sk/projects/bruteforceblocker/blist.php" # BruteForceBlocker IP List
"http://rules.emergingthreats.net/blockrules/compromised-ips.txt" # Emerging Threats - Compromised IPs
"http://www.spamhaus.org/drop/drop.txt" # Spamhaus Don't Route Or Peer List (DROP)
"http://www.spamhaus.org/drop/edrop.txt" # Spamhaus Don't Route Or Peer List (DROP) Extended
"http://cinsscore.com/list/ci-badguys.txt" # C.I. Army Malicious IP List
"http://www.openbl.org/lists/base.txt" # OpenBL.org 90 day List
"http://www.autoshun.org/files/shunlist.csv" # Autoshun Shun List
"http://lists.blocklist.de/lists/all.txt" # blocklist.de attackers
)

for address in "${BLACKLISTS[@]}"
do
echo -e "\nFetching $address\n"
curl "$address" >> $IP_TMP
done

for list in $WIZ_LISTS
do
wget "http://www.wizcrafts.net/$list-iptables-blocklist.html" -O - >> $IP_TMP
done

wget 'http://wget-mirrors.uceprotect.net/rbldnsd-all/dnsbl-3.uceprotect.net.gz' -O - | gunzip | tee -a $IP_TMP

grep -o '^[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}[/][0-9]\{1,3\}' $IP_TMP | tee -a $IP_BLACKLIST_TMP
grep -o '^[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}\.[0-9]\{1,3\}[^/]' $IP_TMP | tee -a $IP_BLACKLIST_TMP

sed -i 's/\t//g' $IP_BLACKLIST_TMP
sort -u $IP_BLACKLIST_TMP | tee $IP_BLACKLIST

rm $IP_TMP
rm $IP_BLACKLIST_TMP

wc -l $IP_BLACKLIST

if hash ipset 2>/dev/null
then
ipset flush bloxlist
while IFS= read -r ip
do
ipset add bloxlist $ip
done < $IP_BLACKLIST
else
echo -e '\nipset not found\n'
echo -e "\nYour bloxlist file is: $IP_BLACKLIST\n"
fi


Download here:
    bad_traffic.pl
    bloxlist.sh

I was reading about the vulnerability in the ‘random’ number generator in iOS 7 (http://threatpost.com/weak-random-number-generator-threatens-ios-7-kernel-exploit-mitigations/104757) and thought I would share a method that I’ve used. Though, I certainly was not on any version of iOS but, at least, I can help in GNU/Linux and BSDs.

What if we want to get some random numbers or strings? We need a salt or something and, in the interest of best practices, we’re trying to restrain the trust given to any single participant in the chain. That is, we do not want to generate the random data from the server that we are on. Let’s make it somewhere else!

YEAH! I know, right? Where to get a random data can be a headache-inducing challenge. Alas! The noble people at Random.org are using atmospheric noise to provide randomness for us regular folk!

Let’s head over and ask for some randomness:
https://www.random.org/strings/?num=1&len=16&digits=on&loweralpha=on&unique=on&format=html&rnd=new

Great! Still feels a little plain. What if big brother saw the string coming over and knew what I was doing? I mean, aside from the fact that I could easily wrap the string with other data of my choosing.

Random.org is really generous with the random data, so why don’t we take advantage of that? Instead of asking for a single string, let’s ask for several. Nobunny will know which one I picked, except for me!

We’ll do that by increasing the 'num' part of the request that we’re sending:
https://www.random.org/strings/?num=25&len=16&digits=on&loweralpha=on&unique=on&format=html&rnd=new


They were also thinking of CLI geeks like us with the 'format' variable. We set that to 'plain' and all the fancy formatting for human eyes is dropped and we get a simple list that we don’t need to use any clever tricks to parse!
curl -s 'https://www.random.org/strings/?num=25&len=16&digits=on&loweralpha=on&unique=on&format=plain&rnd=new'


Now we’ve got 25 strings at the CLI. We can pick one to copy and paste. But what if we don’t want to do the picking? Well, we can use the local system to do that. We’ll have it pick a number between 1 and 25. It’s zero-indexed, so we’re going to increment by 1 so that our number is really between 1 and 25.
echo $(( (RANDOM % 25)+1 ))


Next, we’ll send our list to head with our random number. Head is going to give us the first X lines of what we send to it. So if our random number is 17, then it will give us the first 17 lines from Random.org
curl -s 'https://www.random.org/strings/?num=25&len=16&digits=on&loweralpha=on&unique=on&format=plain&rnd=new' | head -$(( (RANDOM % 25)+1 ))


After that, we’ll use the friend of head: tail. We’ll tell tail that we want only the last record of the list, of psuedo-random length, of strings that are random.
curl -s 'https://www.random.org/strings/?num=25&len=16&digits=on&loweralpha=on&unique=on&format=plain&rnd=new' | head -$(( (RANDOM % 25)+1 )) | tail -1


And we can walk away feeling pretty good about having gotten some properly random data for our needs!

The other day, I was updating one of my systems and I noticed that it had decided to communicate with me in Chinese. Since I don’t know a lick of Chinese, it made for a clumsy exchange.

It was Linux Mint (an Ubuntu variant), so a snip of the output from an ‘apt-get upgrade’ looked like this:

I’m pretty sure I caused it — but there’s no telling what I was working on and how it slipped past me. Anyway, it’s not a difficult problem to fix but I imagine it could look like big trouble.

So, here’s what I did:
> locale

The important part of the output was this:
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=zh_CN.UTF-8


If you want to set your system to use a specific editor, you can set $EDITOR=vi and then you’re going to learn that some programs expect the configuration to be set in $VISUAL and you’ll need to change it there too.

In a similar way, many things were using the en_US.UTF-8 set in LANG, but other things were looking to LANGUAGE and determining that I wanted Chinese.

Having identified the problem, the fix was simple. Firstly, I just changed it in my local environment:
> LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8

That solved the immediate problem but, sooner or later, I’m going to reboot the machine and the Chinese setting would have come back. I needed to record the change somewhere for the system to know about it in the future.

> vim /etc/default/locale

Therein was the more permanent record, so I changed LANGUAGE there also, giving the result:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE=”en_US.UTF-8”
LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES=”en_US.UTF-8”
LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

And now, the computer is back to using characters that I (more-or-less) understand.

In this writer’s opinion, it is vitally important that we take reasonable measures now to help insure anonymity, lest we create a situation where privacy no longer exists, and the simple want of, becomes suspicious.

Here’s how to configure your browser to automatically use a search engine that respects your privacy.

Chrome:

1. Click Settings.
2. Click “Set pages” in the “On startup” section.
3. Enter https://ixquick.com/eng/ in the “Add a new page” text field.
4. Click OK.
5. Click “Manage search engines…”
6. At the bottom of the “Search Engines” dialog, click in the “Add a new search engine” field.
7. Enter
   ixquick
ixquick.com
https://ixquick.com/do/search?lui=english&language=english&cat=web&query=%s
8. Click “Make Default”.
9. Click “Done”.

Firefox:

1. Click the Tools Menu.
2. Click Options.
3. Click the General tab.
4. In “When Firefox Starts” dropdown, select “Show my home page”.
5. Enter https://ixquick.com/eng/ in the “Home Page” text field.
6. Click one of the English options here.
7. Check box for “Start using it right away.”
8. Click “Add”.

Opera:

1. Click “Manage Search Engines
2. Click “Add”
3. Enter
   Name: ixquick
   Keyword: x
   Address: https://ixquick.com/do/search?lui=english&language=english&cat=web&query=%s
4. Check “Use as default search engine”
5. Click “OK”

Internet Explorer:

  _     ___  _ __        ___   _ _____ ___ 
 | |   / _ \| |\ \      / / | | |_   _|__ \
 | |  | | | | | \ \ /\ / /| | | | | |   / /
 | |__| |_| | |__\ V  V / | |_| | | |  |_| 
 |_____\___/|_____\_/\_/   \___/  |_|  (_) 

(This is not a good strategy for privacy.)

Congratulations!

You are now one step closer to not having every motion on the Internet recorded.

This is a relatively small measure, though. You can improve your resistance to prying eyes (e.g., browser fingerprinting) by using the Torbrowser Bundle, or even better, Tails, and routing your web usage through Tor, i2p, or FreeNet.

If you would like more on subjects like anonymyzing, privacy and security then drop me a line via email or Bitmessage me: BM-2D9tDkYEJSTnEkGDKf7xYA5rUj2ihETxVR