c0d3 :: j0rg3

Okay, so you’re running Whonix, Tails or, at least, TorBrowser.

What’s next? You may wish to consider using a VPN. In simple terms, it’s somewhat similar to what Tor offers. That is: you connect to the VPN and your connection passes through them such that the site that you are visiting will see the VPN’s IP address rather than yours. Of course, that means that you can chain them.

That is: (You)->VPN->Tor->Exit node->Web site

The reason that you might feel compelled to take this step is that a party which is able to see your traffic into and out of Tor could still identify you. The thinking is that the parties who wish to interfere with your privacy could be compelled to run Tor bridges, relays and exit nodes. If traffic from your IP address could be matched to requests coming from the Tor exit node then you could, effectively, be identified.

Some people hold that using a VPN to access Tor does not improve your anonymousness. I am not among them. In particular, you will find that IPVanish offers VPN service for under $7 per month and is popular among users of the Tor network. Which means that in addition to the fact that IPVanish is not logging your traffic, there’s an excellent chance that other users are going from IPVanish into Tor, helping to reduce the uniqueness of your traffic.

By the way, I’d suggest poking around the web a little bit. While their prices are already great you can find some even deeper discounts: https://signup.ipvanish.com/?aff=vpnfan-promo

IPVanish’s site offers instructions for installing the VPN in Ubuntu so we’re going to take a look at using IPVanish in Kali — including an interesting and unanticipated snag (and, of course, how to fix it).

Let’s grab the OpenVPN configuration:
wget http://www.ipvanish.com/software/configs/ca.ipvanish.com.crt; wget http://www.ipvanish.com/software/configs/ipvanish-US-New-York-nyc-a01.ovpn

We will need the OpenVPN package for Gnome:
apt install network-manager-openvpn-gnome

Click on the tray in the upper right corner, then the wrench/screwdriver icon:

Select the ‘Network’ folder icon:

We’re choosing ‘Wired’ (even though we’re using wlan0 interface):

We’re setting up a VPN, of course:

Import from file:

Choose the configuration file that we downloaded previously:

Enter ‘User name’ and ‘Password’:

We are connected!

Verified at IPVanish’s site: https://www.ipvanish.com/checkIP.php

And this is where I had anticipated the installation instructions would end.

I just wanted to check a few more things. And I would love to tell you that it was simply my thoroughness and unbridled CLI-fu that led to discover that I was still making ipv6 connections outside of the VPN. Seems that it wasn’t noticed by the test at IPVanish because they deal only in ipv4. I was able to prove my ipv6 address and geolocation by using: http://whatismyipaddress.com/

Further, we can establish that the test at IPVanish is not ipv6-compatible with a quick test.

The easy fix here is to disable ipv6 locally. It is plausible that this could cause unintended consequences and, to be thorough, it would be best to handle your VPN at the firewall. Having support for OpenVPN, you’ll be able to get this running with a huge variety of routing/firewall solutions. You can grab any number of tiny computers and build a professional-quality firewall solution with something like pfSense. Maybe we’ll take a look at getting that configured in a future post.

But, for now, let’s shut down ipv6 in a way that doesn’t involve any grandiose hand-waving magic (i.e., unexplained commands which probably should work) and then test to get confidence in our results.

Let’s use sysctl to find our ipv6 kernel bits and turn them off. Then we’ll load our configuration changes. As a safety, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to look in /etc/sysctl.conf to verify that there aren’t any ipv6 configs in there.

We’ll back up our config file then turn off everything ipv6 by listing everything with the words ‘ipv6’ and ‘disable’:
cp /etc/sysctl.conf /etc/$(date +%Y-%m-%d.%H-%M-%S).sysctl.conf.bak && \
sysctl -a | grep -i ipv6 | grep disable | sed 's/0/1/g' >> /etc/sysctl.conf && \
sysctl -p

To explain what we’re doing:
List all kernel flags; show uonly those containing the string ‘ipv6’; of those that remain, show only those that contain the string ‘disable’:
sysctl -a | grep -i ipv6 | grep disable
Replace the 0 values with 1, to turn ON the disabling, by piping output to:
sed 's/0/1/g'
That all gets stuck on the end of ‘sysctl.conf’ by redirecting stdout to append to the end of that file:
>> /etc/sysctl.conf
Then we reload with:
sysctl -p

Then as a final sanity-check we’ll make sure we can’t find any ipv6 packets sneaking about:
tcpdump -t -n -i wlan0 -s 256 -vv ip6

At this point, assuming our tcpdump doesn’t show any traffic, we should be ipv6-free with all of our ipv4 traffic shipped-off nicely through IPVanish!

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!

Prereqruisites: Docker, Git, SSHFS.

Today we’re going to look at using Docker to create a WordPress installation with the Project Largo parent theme and a child theme stub for us to play with.

Hart Hoover has established an image for getting a WordPress installation up and running using Docker. For whatever reason, it didn’t work for me out-of-box but we’re going to use his work to get started.

Let’s make a place to work and move into that directory:
cd ~
mkdir project.largo.wordpress.docker
cd project.largo.wordpress.docker


We’ll clone the Docker/Wordpress project. For me, it couldn’t untar the latest WordPress. So we’ll download it outside the container, untar it and modify the Dockerfile to simply pull in a copy:
git clone https://github.com/hhoover/docker-wordpress.git
cd docker-wordpress/
ME=$(whoami)
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar xvf latest.tar.gz
sed -i 's/ADD http:\/\/wordpress.org\/latest.tar.gz \/wordpress.tar.gz/ADD \.\/wordpress \/wordpress/' Dockerfile
sed -i '/RUN tar xvzf \/wordpress\.tar\.gz/d' Dockerfile


Then, build the project which may take some time.
sudo docker build -t $ME/wordpress .

If you’ve not the images ready for Docker, the process should begin with something like:
Step 0 : FROM boxcar/raring
Pulling repository boxcar/raring
32737f8072d0: Downloading [> ] 2.228 MB/149.7 MB 12m29s


And end something like:
Step 20 : CMD ["/bin/bash", "/start.sh"]
---> Running in db53e215e2fc
---> 3f3f6489c700
Successfully built 3f3f6489c700


Once the project is built, we will start it and forward ports from the container to the host system, so that the Docker container’s site can be accessed through port 8000 of the host system. So, if you want to see it from the computer that you’ve installed it on, you could go to ‘HTTP://127.0.0.1:8000’. Alternatively, if your host system is already running a webserver, we could use SSHFS to mount the container’s files within the web-space of the host system.

In this example, however, we’ll just forward the ports and mount the project locally (using SSHFS) so we can easily edit the files perhaps using a graphical IDE such as NetBeans or Eclipse.

Okay, time to start our Docker image and find its IP address (so we can mount its files):
DID=$(docker run -p 8000:80 -d $ME/wordpress)
DIP=$(docker inspect $DID | grep IPAddress | cut -d '"' -f 4)
docker logs $DID| grep 'ssh user password:' --color


Copy the SSH password and we will make a local directory to access the WordPress installation of our containter.
cd ~
mkdir largo.mount.from.docker.container
sshfs user@$DIP:/var/www $HOME/largo.mount.from.docker.container
cd largo.mount.from.docker.container
PROJECT=$(pwd -P)


Now, we can visit the WordPress installation and finish setting up. From the host machine, it should be ‘HTTP://127.0.0.1:8000’. There you can configure Title, Username, Password, et cet. and finish installing WordPress.

Now, let’s get us some Largo! Since this is a test project, we’ll sacrifice security to make things easy. Our Docker WordPress site isn’t ready for us to easily install the Largo parent theme, so we’ll make the web directory writable by everybody. Generally, this is not a practice I would condone. It’s okay while we’re experimenting but permissions are very important on live systems!

Lastly, we’ll download and install Largo and the Largo child theme stub.
ssh user@$DIP 'sudo chmod -R 777 /var/www'
wget https://github.com/INN/Largo/archive/master.zip -O $PROJECT/wp-content/themes/largo.zip
unzip $PROJECT/wp-content/themes/largo.zip -d $PROJECT/wp-content/themes/
mv $PROJECT/wp-content/themes/Largo-master $PROJECT/wp-content/themes/largo
wget http://largoproject.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/largo-child.zip -O $PROJECT/wp-content/themes/largo-child.zip
unzip $PROJECT/wp-content/themes/largo-child.zip -d $PROJECT/wp-content/themes
rm -rf $PROJECT/wp-content/themes/__MACOSX/


We are now ready to customize our Project Largo child theme!

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.

Thanks for visiting my little spot on the web. This is a Blosxom ‘blog which, for those who don’t know, is a CGI written in Perl using the file-system (rather than a database).

To the CLI-addicted, this is an awesome little product. Accepting, of course, that you’re going to get under the hood if you’re going to make it the product you want. After some modules and hacking, I’m pleased with the result.

My posts are just text files, meaning I start a new one like: vim ~posts/`date +%Y%m%d`.brief.subject.txt

Note: the back-ticks (`) tell the system that you want to execute the command between ticks, and dynamically insert its output into the command. In this case, the command date with these parameters:

1. (+) we’re going to specify a format
2. (%Y) four-digit year
3. (%m) two-digit month
4. (%d) two-digit day

That means the command above will use Vim to edit a text file named ‘20130507.brief.subject.txt’ in the directory I have assigned to the hash of ‘posts’. (using hash this way is a function of Zsh that I’ll cover in another post)

Toss in a line that identifies tags and, since Perl is the beast of Regex, we pick up the tags and make them links, meta-tags, etc.

Things here are likely to change a lot at first, while I twiddle with CSS and hack away at making a Blosxom that perfectly fits my tastes — so don’t be too alarmed if you visit and things look a tad wonky. It just means that I’m tinkering.

Once the saw-horses have been tucked away, I’m going to take the various notes I’ve made during my years in IT and write them out, in a very simple breakdown, aimed at sharing these with people who know little about how to negotiate the command line. The assumption here is that you have an interest in *nix/BSD. If you’ve that and the CLI is not a major part of your computing experience, it probably will be at some point. If you’re working on systems remotely, graphical interfaces often just impede you.

Once you’ve started working on remote machines, the rest is inevitable. You can either remember how to do everything two ways, through a graphical interface and CLI — or just start using the CLI for everything.

So let’s take a little journey through the kinds of things that make me love the CLI.