Thank you to all you Aucklanders who turned up for my humble presentation last night. I presented a few slides on the theory of wireless cracking, and then we jumped right into a practical demonstration. We failed to crack a WEP key with 400,000 IVs the traditional way (I suspect the firmware outsmarted us), but succeeded using PTW to crack WEP ARP data with 45,000 packets.
We moved onto a wordlist attack on a WPA network, which worked exactly as expected, kicking clients off the network with deauthentication injections, and snagging their WPA handshakes. It took less than a second to wordlist the WPA password, but the wordlist was rigged with only about 8 entries, one of which was correct 
We finished off the evening by exploring OpenWRT, and flashing my WRT54GL back to Linksys firmware, and then back to OpenWRT again.
It was great to meet you all, and it’s my observation that Linux communities around the world share common traits – friendliness, geekiness (the good kind), and an excitement for technology 
I’ve put the slides for last night’s presentation here
Below is a list of links for some of the software we discussed last night:
- OpenWRT (Alternative Open Source Router Firmware)
- BackTrack2 (Forensic Analysis Live CD)
- Aircrack-ng (Suite of wireless hacking tools)
- HostAP (Run a software access point with your Prism2 card)
- IPTables “Recent” (Glen Ogilvie introduced us to this – implements some “temporary blacklisting” functions in iptables rules without any additional software)
My wife and I differ on our Facebook philosophies. Maybe it’s one of those gender-specific things. Her rule is “don’t befriend me unless you really want to talk to me“. She’s a woman. She wants to connect. To relate. To be more than a status icon on somebody’s hundreds-of-friends list.
My rule is “befriend me. Maybe we’ll even talk“. It’s a sad fact that my daily life is so crowded, with so many actions, inputs, and open loops, that unless I notice you on Twitter, IM, email, Facebook, or “RealLife” (probably in that order of update frequency!), we’re going to miss each other.
So, the big personal advantages of Facebook for me, is my newfound ability to keep in touch with friends near and far, with minimal effort. I’ve found old school buddies, family members, and new friends. I check that handy little mini-feed, and now I know that my cousin is traveling, a friend is immigrating to Switzerland, my sister started teaching again yesterday, and another friend is currently in Peru.
So, if I befriend you, but don’t engage you, I’m not “using” you, I’m “hanging out” with you, mostly in comfortable silence
I’m excited to be attending the WellyLUG ([[Wellington]] [[Linux Users Group]]) meeting on 20 Aug 2007. As discussed this morning on the LUG, I’ll be giving a presentation on penetrating WEP / WPA wireless networks, how to avoid said penetration with an open source, flashed, [[WRT54GL]], and how to integrate your [[Squid Cache]] with [[Active Directory]] to provide detailed user activity logs.
Please post any comments or requests here
I’m hoping to visit the various LUGs during our trip to New Zealand, and have noticed that a LUG sometimes has trouble in securing a speaker for a particular month. This lead me to thinking about the topics on which I could potentially speak. I’m hardly an expert, but I have enough experience in the following fields to give an interesting presentation:
- Creating a “super-router” with OpenWRT : How to take a regular Linksys router, flash the firmware with open source software, and end up with a far more powerful product, capable of enterprise WPA2->Radius authentication, WDS, VPN, etc.
- Penetration testing on a wireless network: How to break the encryption on WEP and WPA, via brute force or packet injection. How insecure is your network?
- How to secure your network against WEP / WPA intrusion by using Radius authentication, on your “super-router”. (above)
- How to setup a simple Asterisk PBX, using Trixbox.
- Setting up your PVR using MythTV.
- Run your own blog, using open source software.
- Setting up a Squid Proxy Server with Active Directory authentication to generate internet usage reports by user.
I could go on and on, but these were my initial thoughts, and probably the ones I’d have the most fun presenting
I found this CommonCraft video on Simon’s blog. It explains, with the use of simple, paper-based pictures, how social networking works, and why it’s a good idea. They also have tutorials on RSS, and Wikis. [gv data="6a_KF7TYKVc"][/gv]
If this works, my facebook account should start reflecting my blog posts, and comments on the facebook notes should show up here in the blog
Today I installed our new office Asterisk / TrixBox server. It’s a little ol’ P2, but after dealing with dusty CD-ROM drives, and flakey old hard drives, I managed to get it up and running. I have to admit, up to that point, it was a bit of a pain in the ass. After installation, however, it’s a different story.
We installed a SIP softphone, “X-Lite“, and within a few minutes, I had a telephone extention, a voicemail box, custom busy / unavailable messages, etc. I’m very impressed with the ease-of-use, and the feature set offered by this combination of CentOS, Asterisk, FreePBX, and misc extras.
As soon as our ISDN line is installed, I intend testing inbound / outbound trunks using the Duxbury PCI ISDN modem I’ve just purchased
I recently upgraded a client from a m0n0wall firewall to a pfSense firewall. Our primary reason for the upgrade was to allow him to save his config onto a USB stick, rather than the stiffy disks he was using, which suffered corruption.
It’s an elegant solution, because it also allows him (by way of two differing config files) to switch between his primary broadband solution, and his backup, simply by switching USB sticks, and rebooting.
We ran into a problem, initially, however. Turns out, unless we disabled USB keyboard support in the BIOS, we’d have a 2-minute wait on bootup, as FreeBSD detected devices. Once we crossed that hurdle, installation and setup continued smoothly.
The other caveat we discovered was that pfSense refuses to load the config from a write-protected USB stick.
We worked around these issues, and all-in-all, I’m very satisfied with the solution. It’s secure, and it’s got a very easy to use web GUI which allows the client to create his own rules, view traffic graphs, etc.
