Argus 3.x On Linksys WRT54GL

I have bought two units of Linksys WRT54GL wlan router previously so that I can run Linux and getting network security monitoring tools running on it as well. This little device has very limited space but you can't beat linux as router device. One of the unit is currently living in spoonfork's place to serve that Darth Vader, and another one is with me.

Since Carter has argus supported on OpenWRT, I have been thinking of getting argus installed on it(MIPS platform). And after some tinkering, I have successfully loading argus on it and export the network flow to another box in the network. Here's the complete howto that you can follow exactly to get argus compiled for OpenWRT Kamikaze 8.09(MIPS platform) using Ubuntu Linux.

Prepare the environment, my main directory to build this is /home/geek00l/i-Projects -

shell>sudo apt-get install gcc g++ patch binutils \
flex bison make pkg-config unzip zlib1g zlib1g-dev \
libc6 libc6-dev gawk autoconf upslug2 libncurses5-dev

To build OpenWRT Kamikaze 8.09, svn up the source first -

shell>svn co https://svn.openwrt.org/openwrt/branches/8.09 kamikaze-8.09

shell>cd kamikaze-8.09

Start the building process -

shell>make defconfig

shell>make package/symlinks

shell>make menuconfig

shell>make

Take a coffee break when you run make .....

Install libpcap, this is the only dependencies we need to get argus 3 compiled -

shell>make package/libpcap-compile V=99

shell>make package/libpcap-install V=99

Check out the gcc that we need to use -

shell>/home/geek00l/i-Projects/kamikaze-8.09/staging_dir/toolchain-mipsel_gcc3.4.6/mipsel-linux-uclibc/bin/gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 3.4.6 (OpenWrt-2.0)
Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Now we need to set the environment variables for this build -

shell>export PATH=/home/geek00l/i-Projects/kamikaze-8.09/staging_dir/toolchain-mipsel_gcc3.4.6/mipsel-linux-uclibc/bin:/home/geek00l/i-Projects/kamikaze-8.09/staging_dir/toolchain-mipsel_gcc3.4.6/bin:$PATH

shell>export AR=/home/geek00l/i-Projects/kamikaze-8.09/staging_dir/toolchain-mipsel_gcc3.4.6/mipsel-linux-uclibc/bin/ar

shell>export AS=/home/geek00l/i-Projects/kamikaze-8.09/staging_dir/toolchain-mipsel_gcc3.4.6/mipsel-linux-uclibc/bin/as

shell>export LD=/home/geek00l/i-Projects/kamikaze-8.09/staging_dir/toolchain-mipsel_gcc3.4.6/mipsel-linux-uclibc/bin/ld

shell>export NM=/home/geek00l/i-Projects/kamikaze-8.09/staging_dir/toolchain-mipsel_gcc3.4.6/mipsel-linux-uclibc/bin/nm

shell>export CC=/home/geek00l/i-Projects/kamikaze-8.09/staging_dir/toolchain-mipsel_gcc3.4.6/mipsel-linux-uclibc/bin/gcc

shell>export CPP=/home/geek00l/i-Projects/kamikaze-8.09/build_dir/toolchain-mipsel_gcc3.4.6/gcc-3.4.6-initial/gcc/cpp

shell>export GCC=/home/geek00l/i-Projects/kamikaze-8.09/staging_dir/toolchain-mipsel_gcc3.4.6/mipsel-linux-uclibc/bin/gcc

shell>export CXX=/home/geek00l/i-Projects/kamikaze-8.09/staging_dir/toolchain-mipsel_gcc3.4.6/mipsel-linux-uclibc/bin/g++

shell>export RANLIB=/home/geek00l/i-Projects/kamikaze-8.09/staging_dir/toolchain-mipsel_gcc3.4.6/mipsel-linux-uclibc/bin/ranlib

shell>export ac_cv_linux_vers=2.4.35

shell>export LDFLAGS="-static"

shell>export CFLAGS="-Os -s"

Time to have fun, doing cross-compile for argus so it works on MIPS platform -

shell>cd /home/geek00l/i-Projects/argus-3.0.1.beta.2

shell>./configure --host=mipsel-linux \
--with-openwrt=/home/geek00l/i-Projects/kamikaze-8.09/staging_dir \
--with-libpcap=/home/geek00l/i-Projects/kamikaze-8.09/build_dir/mipsel/libpcap-0.9.8

shell>make

shell>file bin/argus
bin/argus: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, MIPS, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, stripped

Transfer it to my OpenWRT -

shell>scp -P 55555 bin/argus root@192.168.1.1:/tmp

To export argus network flow on ppp0 interface -

shell>argus -i ppp0 -B 192.168.1.1 -P 561 -d

To intercept the network flow -

shell>ra -S 192.168.1.1:561 - ip

I have found some good references here to get me going, and I would like to thank to David Watson(UK Honeynet) for his guide on building nepenthes on openwrt too.

Reference:
http://www.frontiernet.net/~beakmyn/CrossCompile.htm
http://www.ukhoneynet.org/research/building-nepenthes-on-the-openwrt-embedded-platform/
http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=31794
http://gargoyle-router.com/openwrt-coding.php

Since this embedded device has very limited space, there's no point to run packet logger locally, other tools I would like to run on it so that I can export pcap to other system should be something like packetforward or rpcap. If anyone has experience to get any of these tools installed on OpenWRT, please do share!

Enjoy (;])

OpenWRT: Allow SSH Access On WAN Interface

Here's the quick way to allow SSH Access for WAN interface on OpenWRT, I configure my ssh to run on port 12345 instead of 22 to avoid automated probes from internet using the web interface, then just run this in the terminal -

shell>/usr/sbin/iptables -I INPUT 1 -p tcp --dport 12345 -j LOG

shell>/usr/sbin/iptables -I INPUT 1 -p tcp --dport 12345 -j ACCEPT

To check if it loads properly -

shell>/usr/sbin/iptables -L | grep 12345
LOG tcp -- anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:12345 LOG level warning
ACCEPT tcp -- anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:12345

To make sure it survives reboot -

shell>nvram set rc_firewall="/usr/sbin/iptables -I INPUT 1 -p tcp --dport 12345 -j LOG"

shell>nvram set rc_firewall="/usr/sbin/iptables -I INPUT 1 -p tcp --dport 12345 -j ACCEPT"

shell>nvram commit

Thanks to the link here.

Done!

Cheers (;])

Tshark: Decrypt WEP

Yes, you can decrypt wep using airdecap-ng from aircrack-ng suite, or using wireshark gui. However you can also use tshark to decrypt wep with known key, and you can define many keys to be used to decrypt wep packets as well.

Quick example -

shell>tshark -t ad -o 'wlan.enable_decryption:TRUE' \
-o "wlan.wep_key1:1122aabbcc" -nr wlan-wep.pcap

By the way, you can also decrypt wpa similarly.

Enjoy (;])

Ubuntu: Picviz 0.5 Installation

I first learned about Picviz in secviz.org and know more about it during Honeynet 2009 Annual Meeting in Malaysia when the Picviz author - Toady presented his stuffs. Anyway here's the straightforward Picviz version 0.5 installation guide on Ubuntu Linux -

shell>apt-get install \
cmake python-all-dev python-qt4 libevent-dev libpcre3-dev libcairo2-dev

Make sure you install cmake 2.6, if you are still using Ubuntu 8.04 - Hardy, you need to get this one instead -

http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy-backports/i386/cmake/download

Download picviz-0.5 -

shell>wget \
http://www.wallinfire.net/picviz/attachment/wiki/ReleasesDownload/picviz-0.5.tar.gz?format=raw

shell>tar xvzf picviz-0.5.tar.gz

shell>cd picviz-0.5

shell>make

shell>sudo make install

If you want to install it on your prefferable directory, you can do this before make -

shell>cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local/stow/picviz-0.5.0

Build python binding -

shell>cd src/libpicviz/bindings/python/

shell>sudo python ./setup.py install

Build gui frontend -

shell>cd src/frontend

shell>sudo python ./setup.py install

To launch the python gui -

shell>picviz-gui

Done.

Enjoy (;])

Mac OSX: Capturing 802.11 WLAN Traffic

This is trick for Mac OSX users, if you want to capture 802.11 WLAN packets, you can't do that with normal capturing argument using tcpdump. Normally en1 is the wireless network interface for Apple Macbook.

shell>sudo tcpdump -s 0 -nni en1

tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode
listening on en1, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 96 bytes

If you look at the link-type, it is EN10MB so 802.11 Radio information header is not going to be captured, however we can define the link type with tcpdump, we can list the supported link type for the interface first -

shell>sudo tcpdump -nni en1 -L
Data link types (use option -y to set):
IEEE802_11_RADIO_AVS (802.11 plus AVS radio information header) (not supported)
IEEE802_11 (802.11)
IEEE802_11_RADIO (802.11 plus BSD radio information header)
EN10MB (Ethernet)

Specify link type with -y option -

shell>sudo tcpdump -y 'IEEE802_11_RADIO' -ttttnni en1
tcpdump: data link type IEEE802_11_RADIO
tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode
listening on en1, link-type IEEE802_11_RADIO (802.11 plus BSD radio information header), capture size 96 bytes
2009-02-18 00:55:13.948664 3466317997us tsft 1.0 Mb/s 2462 MHz (0x0080) -44dB signal 0dB noise antenna 0 Beacon (SSID) [1.0* 2.0* 5.5* 11.0* Mbit] ESS CH: 11, PRIVACY
2009-02-18 00:55:14.051029 3466420387us tsft 1.0 Mb/s 2462 MHz (0x0080) -44dB signal 0dB noise antenna 0 Beacon (SSID) [1.0* 2.0* 5.5* 11.0* Mbit] ESS CH: 11, PRIVACY

If you want to analyze 802.11 traffic, you can definitely play around with this. Of course if you want to put your Macbook into RFMON mode, the best tool around is Kismac.

Enjoy (;])

HITB Dubai 2009

This year HITB Dubai is coming again, there will be 3 technical trainings and good line up of speakers so don't miss it!

Economy is not in good shape for the moment, but hackers are still working hard so make yourself to the conference and see what they are up to ;]

For more information, check out -

http://conference.hackinthebox.org/hitbsecconf2009dubai/

Cheers ;]

Pcapr - Another pcap repository

I just found out another public packet capture repository which is supported by Mu Dynamics. For more detail, check out the web site here ->

http://www.pcapr.net/home

More packets for the monkeys!

Cheers ;]

Ubuntu: Netdude Installation Revisit

Many people have urged me to update my old Netdude installation guide, I don't know what went wrong for them but here's how I get Netdude 0.5 installed on Ubuntu 8.04.

Make sure you have debian packages that I mentioned in old post installed properly via apt-get, now download Netdude 0.5.0, libnetdude 0.11 and libpcapav 0.8 from here.

The sequence of installation is libpcapav -> libnetdude -> Netdude.

To install libpcapav 0.8 -

shell>tar xvzf libpcapav-0.8.tar.gz

shell>cd libpcapav-0.8

shell>./configure --prefix=/usr/local/stow/libpcapav-0.8

shell>make

shell>sudo make install

shell>cd /usr/local/stow

shell>sudo stow libpcapav-0.8

To install libnetdude 0.11 -

shell>tar xvzf libnetdude-0.11.tar.gz

shell>cd libnetdude-0.11

shell>./configure --prefix=/usr/local/stow/libnetdude-0.11

shell>make

shell>sudo make install

shell>cd /usr/local/stow

shell>sudo stow libnetdude-0.11

To install netdude 0.5.0 -

shell>export LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib

shell>tar xvzf netdude-0.5.0.tar.gz

shell>cd netdude-0.5.0

shell>./configure --prefix=/usr/local/stow/netdude-0.5.0

shell>make

shell>sudo make install

shell>cd /usr/local/stow

shell>sudo stow netdude-0.5.0

Now you can run netdude and check out its version -

shell>netdude --version
0.5.0

The reason why I like to use stow to manage my software installation is that I can install multiple version of netdude in /usr/local/stow first, and choose which to use by stowing and unstowing(stow -D) them.

There you go, it should be flawless unless my memory sux(though I'm).

Enjoy (;])

Ubuntu: Unicornscan Revisit

I have written about how to install unicornscan on Ubuntu previously here, and it seems a lot of people have problem getting unicornscan compiled on Ubuntu/Debian. So here's the revisit of mine to make it more clear and it should work on Ubuntu 8.x if you are following the steps accordingly.

Install all dependencies -

shell>apt-get install \
libpcap0.8-dev libgeoip-dev libltdl3-dev ibdumbnet1 libdumbnet-dev

shell>sudo ln -s /usr/include/dumbnet.h /usr/include/dnet.h

Download unicornscan and decompress it -

shell>tar xvjf unicornscan-0.4.7-2.tar.bz2

shell>cd unicornscan-0.4.7

shell>./configure --prefix=/usr/local/stow/unicornscan-0.4.7

Thanks to Debian package, since libdumbnet is used, so we need to replace the linker flags, search for files with ldnet

shell>find ./ -type f -exec grep -H 'ldnet' '{}' \;
./src/Makefile.in:G_LDADD=$(LDFLAGS) -lscan -lparse -lunilib -lpcap -lltdl -ldnet -luext
./src/tools/Makefile.in: $(LIBTOOL) --mode=link $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o fantaip fantaip.lo $(G_LDPATH) $(G_LDADD) -lpcap -ldnet
./src/tools/Makefile: $(LIBTOOL) --mode=link $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o fantaip fantaip.lo $(G_LDPATH) $(G_LDADD) -lpcap -ldnet
./src/Makefile:G_LDADD=$(LDFLAGS) -lscan -lparse -lunilib -lpcap -lltdl -ldnet -luext
./src/scan_progs/Makefile.in:G_LDADD=-lscan -lparse -lunilib -lltdl -ldnet -luext
./src/scan_progs/Makefile:G_LDADD=-lscan -lparse -lunilib -lltdl -ldnet -luext

To replace ldnet to ldumbnet at one shot, do

shell>for i in `find ./ -type f -exec grep -l 'ldnet' '{}' \;`; do sed -i bak -e 's/ldnet/ldumbnet/g' $i; done

Now we can compile and install

shell>make

shell>sudo make install

You should now have it install in /usr/local/stow, just do

shell>cd /usr/local/stow

shell>sudo stow unicornscan-0.4.7

DONE!

Enjoy (;])

Latex Editor

If you are using latex(I do especially for presentation slide since spoonfork corrupted me), there's one good latex editor that works across multiple OS platforms. Some people will just use vim as the editor but I prefer texmaker. You can check out its main site here -

http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/

And it even works on Mac OSX!

Cheers ;]

Interesting Network Adapter

This looks like interesting dual ports network adapter with bypass function, more information ->

http://www.portwell.com/products/detail.asp?CUSTCHAR1=ABN-192

If you know where can get this in Malaysia, please do let me know.

NIDS: Administration, Management & Provisioning

We often find many resources that discuss about NIDS technologies, and how can you setup one, however things that are really missed out there(even in the internet) should be the following.

If you are managing tons of Network Intrusion Detection systems(NIDS), for tons I mean more than 50, I would like to hear from you about -

1. What tools do you use to manage all the NIDS, and why you choose them over others?
- For example ssh, however I would like to know more about tools you use to manage massive NIDS instead of one, and the reason you choose it.

2. How do you perform efficient administration securely? For examples,
- System changes/updates
- NIDS tools' changes/updates
- NIDS rules' changes/updates
- NIDS Configuration files' changes/updates
- NIDS Policies' changes/updates

3. Which method you like to use in order to manage them, and why? For example,
- Server pushes rules update to all the sensors(Push)
- Sensors pull the rules update from server(Pull)

3. NIDS health monitoring and self-healing
- I'm talking about something like this, if the system is in incosistent state, operators will be notified. If certain process die, it should recover by itself.

I consider NIDS as critical system and it should be managed wisely to prevent misconfiguration, downtime and so forth. Therefore we should have solid answers for the questions above if we are going for massive NIDS implementation and deployment.

Any in sight or valuable thoughts to share are welcomed!

Peace ;]

*nixes Backup Solution

I'm looking at various backup solutions that are availabe for unix variants. There are so many of them and I'm just listing them down here in case I forgot what I have found.

- Timevault

- Flyback

- Kbackup

- Rsnapshot

- Rdiff-Backup

Some other solutions can be found here.

Cheers ;]

FreeBSD ZFS

I have been listening people talking about ZFS, and it is ported to FreeBSD, I don't play with it until today.

It does seem that FreeBSD is getting solarish, ZFS, Dtrace and what else. Anyway here's simple screenshot of mine with ZFS setup -

I may spend more time playing with it, if you are interested in ZFS on FreeBSD, you should check out -

http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS

By the way, FreeBSD 7.1 RC1 is out, grab it while it's hot!

Cheers ;]

Anonymous Troll

I have previously blogged about my experience in Singapore Govware here, however I don't know I get such interesting comment until I was told by a friend who read it. The comment is written as following -

--------------------------------------------------------------
Anonymous said ....
With all due respect to you and your great work with hex and what not, I'd like to rant a bit. I know its belated, but here goes :)

Sometimes security is not about you 'teaching' people what to do with your l337 NSM toolkit. It is normal for security conferences/events to be a closed door affair or by invitation only. I bet there were some concerns by some parties that you're blackhats/can't_be_trusted/not-really-security-analyst whom they can share information with. So its better late than never to kick you out. The level or kind of stuff you and other l337 friends write at security.org.my also don't help I think.

So get real, be trusted, and stop associating yourself with ppl whose deep insights on security are only by taking screenshots at defacements or error messages, blowing them out of porportion, make kidd1e5 happy and then sell a training program! So don't be disheartened at being kicked out at a per invite only program.
-----------------------------------------------------------

I don't really want to argue anything here, my point here is if you don't know me, don't justify me with your narrow minded like you know me very well, and stop acting like anonymous coward.

Peace ;]

What Am I Doing?

I hardly blog these days, and have been busy with current works plus my own fun research. It's about the end of year 2008 and I figure life is more challenging when I'm getting older.

raWPacket is currently in the state of "slowing down" or you can call it slacking, so we will restart our engine next year(2009). Hopefully we can get many interesting projects done in coming year, some are on the way!

It's been couple of months working for GE now, thanks to my friend - Richard Bejtlich for the opportunity, faithfully. For the other guys I'm working with, you guys are always rocking!

For my own research, lets keep it secret for now, it will be revealed soon.

Cheers ;]

Drunken Monkey: Running Network Miner with Wine

Network-Based Forensics is emerging now, we are seeing more and more NBF tools in active development now, one of the decent NBF tool I would like to mention here is NetworkMiner which is developed by Erik Hjelmvik. NetworkMiner is developed using .net framework, therefore it has Windows version only, I will show you how you can get it running using Wine on *nix based OS especially Ubuntu Linux.

Installing Wine -

shell>sudo apt-get install wine wine-dev cabextract

Configure Wine -

shell>winecfg

In Application tab, change windows version to Windows 2000

shell>wget http://kegel.com/wine/winetricks

Install cofefronts and .net framework 2.0 -

shell>sh winetricks corefonts dotnet20

Download NetworkMiner -

shell>wget \
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=189429

Unzip it and run -

shell>wine NetworkMiner.exe

Here you go -

Cheers (;])

Network-Based Forensics: Xplico

If you are interested in Network-Based Forensics, you should give this tool a try - Xplico, this tool is quite promising and in active development.

During HITB Training and Conference, I have mentioned about the challenge and problem with Network-Based Forensics, one of them is the lack of protocol dissectors(especially application layer). Looking at Xplico roadmap, you can see they are trying to add more and more dissectors to be more advance in traffic reconstruction(you can't really base on tcp itself as the session itself is mostly handled by the application layer these days).

Xplico is definitely designed for Network-Based Forensics only, and it follows file system forensics approach where you can create case and extract data from the pcap. There are few things I would like to see it in Xplico if possible -

1. Support more packet format(or conversion)
2. Better search engine(not only email)
3. Report generation
4. Data export to various format
5. Per host traffic information

If you are interested in trying out Xplico quickly, you can check out Deft liveCD.

More screenshots!!!!!

Enjoy ;]

HeX In The Box

We release the HeX special edition for HITB Security Conference, the theme we use is HeX In The Box. If you are the HITB Conference participant, you might or might not get the CD we distribute in the first day of conference as we only have about 120 pieces of them so it is really limited.

This special edition comes with new wallpaper and cd sticker as well. Thanks to Vickson for the comic style of design this time!

HeXInTheBox CD Sticker

HeXInTheBox Wallpaper

On the other hand, HeX hits more than 10,000 downloads since the release of version 2.0!

Cheers (;])

Bro 1.4: Eating Netflow

The new Bro can import NetFlow version 5 data now, if you are using HeX 2.0, you can test it quickly. Here's how you can test its new ability to work with NetFlow.

Using fprobe to export NetFlow version 5 data on network interface le0 to address 127.0.0.1 and port 5555 -

shell>sudo fprobe -n 5 -f ip -i le0 127.0.0.1:5555

Using bro to eat NetFlow data and log them to disk -

shell>sudo bro --netflow 127.0.0.1:5555 HeX netflow

You will find netflow.log in your $BROLOGS directory, and you can simply examine them with any text viewer.

I'm going to distribute bro-1.4 binary that works well with HeX so that people can try them out if they are interested in latest Bro offerings.

Enjoy (;])

HITB 2008 and Our Technical Training

HackInTheBox Security Conference 2008 in Malaysia is around the corner, this time we are going to bring you triple tracks which will be running simultaneously at the same time and participants are allowed to join any track they like to. Plus we have great speakers line up.

The old and useless CTF organizing team will retire this time and be replaced by the new bloods, so we hope they are doing the best they can to get the game going. On the other hand, there will be OpenHack as usual. We also hope you are going to enjoy HITB Lab which will be running for the first time ever.

For the moment, me and spoonfork are updating our training materials, just like previous training, our training goes with the name "Structured Network Threat Analysis & Forensics". However we are changing strategy and bringing new stuffs. Besides Network Security Monitoring, we are going to focus more on Network Based Forensics and its challenges. We also include exercises so that participants can get the feel of it during the training session.

If you haven't registered yet, I think you should. You can check out the price of registration and it's real cheap. Don't miss the chance to learn about latest security issues, meet the world class security professionals and get to know local talents around!

Cheers ;]

Bro: 1.4 Release

Kudos again to Bro development team for making the release of version 1.4. This release has included tons of new features and also tons of bug fixes.

I'm looking forward to try out things like NetFlow, Time Machine and many others. If you are interested in Bro, grab the latest version while it's hot. You can download it at -

http://bro-ids.org/download.html

The detail changes can be read here.

Enjoy ;]

Foss.my 2008

Many friends in OSS circle have already blogged about this, so I won't repeat anything much, if you are interested in Foss, and you are in Malaysia, this is definitely the event that you should come.

For more information, look here ->

http://foss.my/

Enjoy ;]

Expanding Response: Deeper Analysis

My friend Russ McRee just published a paper called Expanding Response: Deeper Analysis for Incident Handlers with SANS for his GCIH Gold cert that includes details on Argus, HeX, NSM-console, and NetworkMiner using content from the original ISSA articles as well as current updates.

You can find his paper here -

http://www.sans.org/reading_room/whitepapers/incident/32904.php

Nice work Russ!

Cheers ;]

Govware: Positive Security?

Few months ago, Dhillon(HITB Founder) told us about Govware which is organized by Ministry Of Home Affairs Singapore and they invited us to their conference.

So HITB is invited to Singapore Govware, and we were quite looking forward to this event as we are told Singapore is first world country and they are great in event organizing. Unfortunately this time, we are going down to Singapore with our own budget(Other events' organizers pay our accomodation for our effort) but we thought since it's just our neighbor country, lets pay on our own.

So we are being supportive to run Web Hacking Challenge for Govware as well(Rufio handles this), me and Mel are also invited to give talk in closed door - Law Enforcement Track to share our knowledge with the audience. In the first day of event, everything goes smoothly. Me and mel are presenting 8 Layers Of Security and performing Network Forensics using HeX 2.0 that we have just released few days ago. We are glad to know some of people who are working in law enforcement units.

So I don't want to comment much about other presentations since I don't really listen to them as we are not allowed to, but we still managed to listen to 3 talks which are also closed door since their people never block us. But then again, we were banned from the room after their clueless dudes figure out we were in the talk, they should have blocked us from going in instead of asking us out in the middle of the presentation.

So nothing much happening in the first day of event except this shit, we went back to apartment and grabbed our dinner.

So today(second day of Govware) we went to the venue, and we just started running Web Hacking Challenge, as usual all of us are wearing HITB t-shirt to present who we are. Then out of sudden, there's some "don't know who"(probably fear to lose(kiasu) organizer) came to us, and informed us that we are not allowed to deliver our HITB conference fliers, we can't promote our HITB Conference in overt style(I don't get this, we just deliver our flier for whoever passes by our booth like everybody else instead of doing it aggresively) and we are also prohibited to wear our own HITB t-shirt as well(but we see others can wear their own company t-shirt(hint: Splunk) and they are not abused.

So what should we do now after coming down all the way from Kuala Lumpur to this Govware Singapore? Absolutely nothing but get out of this crap place. And Govware is promoting Positive Security but can't even allow us to inform the audience about another security conference with world class security experts in neighbor country(to be honest our conference are totally different than Govware as we are emphasizing more on new attack mechanisms and more technical oriented).

So to conclude this, we are now enlightened of how thisso called "First World Country" Ministry people manages international event, with unfair treatment where other companies can do their "not so overt" marketing(because they are sponsors?), they can wear their own company t-shirt, but we are asked to fuck off!

So this is definitely great job from them, and thanks for the awful invitation, you can fuck off now. Kudos!

So Enjoyable ;]

HeX 2.0 Release - The Bonobo

Today is big day for us as we finally have HeX 2.0 Release - The Bonobo unleashed.

After many months of struggling in both testing and development phases, there are a lot of new features added in this release. To sum it up, we have -

1. FreeBSD 7 Stable
2. Unionfs
3. NSM Console updates
4. Tons of analysis alias and scripts
5. Tons of NSM tools' signatures
6. Firefox - Useful websites bookmark
7. Liferea - Security rss feeds

For more information, you can check out its own site which is located at -

http://www.rawpacket.org/projects/hex/hex-livecd/version-20-release

I would like to say thanks to HeX team members for all the hard works and continuous efforts. You guys are just rocking!!!!!

Enjoy (;])

FreeBSD: Pktanon Installation

What is pktanon?
PktAnon performs network trace anonymization. It is highly configurable and uses anonymization profiles.

My friend Richard has actually blogged about it especially for Debian platform.

One of the pktanon main developer - Christoph has emailed me that they have fixed pktanon and make it work on FreeBSD, and I'd like to try it out, I won't make a port for FreeBSD as I'm told that Wesley is working on pktanon port.

But if you are interested, that's how you can get it to work on FreeBSD.

Get the dependencies, install these two FreeBSD ports -
1. boost
2. xerces-c2

We can now perform pktanon installation -

shell>wget \
http://www.tm.uka.de/software/pktanon/download/pktanon-1.2.1-dev.tar.gz

shell>tar xvzf pktanon-1.2.1-dev.tar.gz

shell>cd pktanon-1.2.1-dev

shell>export CFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include

shell>export CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include

shell>export LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib

shell>./configure

shell>make

shell>sudo make install

You can now start working with pktanon, I won't show those as you can check out the information from pktanon website. We will include pktanon in HeX(definitely not HeX 2.0 but maybe 2.0.1 as we already froze the port tree while pktanon port is still not in yet). It's worth to add it as people who would like to contribute to Openpacket need to anonymize their packet trace.

Cheers (;])

HeX 2.0 R: Preview

Here we reveal the latest HeX 2.0 Release, it will be out very soon. Stay tuned!








The joy for packet monkeys (;])

HeX 2.0 Release is NEAR

We are going to unleash HeX 2.0 Release, if no major issue found again it should be on next week.

Stay tuned ;]

Another NSM related blog

Our webmaster guti has his own technical blog, if you are interested in his works, check out -

http://www.gutizz.com/

I learned some tips and tricks about ourmon and grace, though he doesn't blog frequently, but I found his post with quality.

Enjoy ;]

FreeBSD: Port's Foo

I have learned a few new tricks about using FreeBSD ports which I don't know last time, there you go!

For ports which provides configure options, you can actually configure it via -

shell>make config

To show the configuration -

shell>make showconfig

To remove current configuration, or reset it to default -

shell>make rmconfig

To build the package from port -

shell>make package

To build the package from port for its dependencies as well -

shell>make package-recursive

If you have the port previously installed, and you want to reinstall with different option set, make sure you have the "work" directory deleted in particular port or else the new configure option won't be used.

Enjoy ;]

HeX 021: Decode base64

There are a lot of malicious contents which are actually encoded with base64 to create confusion.

This is just quick one as I have friend asking about it on how to decode base64 encoding. One liner with python -

shell>python -c "import binascii; \
binascii.a2b_base64('encoded strings here')

Or you can use nsm console if you are running HeX -

nsm>decode base64 'encoded strings here'

Enjoy ;]

HeX 021: Resolving Ihack 2008 password.pcap

My friend ayoi has posted Ihack 2008: Defense Challenge here, I don't really have time to look into the whole game. However I have tried to give it a shot for password.pcap to figure out what's the passphrase.

I decide to use HeX liveCD for this quick challenge since chfl4gs_ has presented it in IHack. Initial look at the traffic -

shell>tcpdump -ttttnnr password.pcap

reading from file /home/analyzt/rp-Analysis/password.pcap, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet)
2008-08-14 12:21:11.469308 IP 10.10.3.126.1337 > 10.10.75.1.31337: S 1879048192:1879048192(0) win 512
2008-08-14 12:21:11.469524 IP 10.10.75.1.31337 > 10.10.3.126.1337: R 0:0(0) ack 1879048193 win 0
2008-08-14 12:21:12.212445 IP 10.10.3.126.1337 > 10.10.75.1.31337: S 872415232:872415232(0) win 512
2008-08-14 12:21:12.212549 IP 10.10.75.1.31337 > 10.10.3.126.1337: R 0:0(0) ack 3288334337 win 0
2008-08-14 12:21:12.959563 IP 10.10.3.126.1337 > 10.10.75.1.31337: S 603979776:603979776(0) win 512
2008-08-14 12:21:12.959710 IP 10.10.75.1.31337 > 10.10.3.126.1337: R 0:0(0) ack 3019898881 win 0
2008-08-14 12:21:13.656942 IP 10.10.3.126.1337 > 10.10.75.1.31337: S 889192448:889192448(0) win 512

Output truncated .....

Initial view of the network traffic tells you that the network traffic contains no data transfer, and it is heavily crafted(port). It also hints you that the passphrase should be residing in the packet header. Therefore I start dig into the header by printing it in hex and ascii dump output.

shell>tcpdump -XXttttnnr password.pcap
2008-08-14 12:21:11.469308 IP 10.10.3.126.1337 > 10.10.75.1.31337: S 1879048192:
1879048192(0) win 512
0x0000: 000c 294b dcf1 000c 2945 914a 0800 4500 ..)K....)E.J..E.
0x0010: 0028 5c00 0000 4006 bc3d 0a0a 037e 0a0a .(\...@..=...~..
0x0020: 4b01 0539 7a69 7000 0000 0000 0000 5002 K..9zip.......P.
0x0030: 0200 5bad 0000 ..[...
2008-08-14 12:21:11.469524 IP 10.10.75.1.31337 > 10.10.3.126.1337: R 0:0(0) ack
1879048193 win 0
0x0000: 000c 2945 914a 000c 294b dcf1 0800 4500 ..)E.J..)K....E.
0x0010: 0028 0000 4000 4006 d83d 0a0a 4b01 0a0a .(..@.@..=..K...
0x0020: 037e 7a69 0539 0000 0000 7000 0001 5014 .~zi.9....p...P.
0x0030: 0000 5d9a 0000 ..]...
2008-08-14 12:21:12.212445 IP 10.10.3.126.1337 > 10.10.75.1.31337: S 872415232:8
72415232(0) win 512
0x0000: 000c 294b dcf1 000c 2945 914a 0800 4500 ..)K....)E.J..E.
0x0010: 0028 2000 0000 4006 f83d 0a0a 037e 0a0a .(....@..=...~..
0x0020: 4b01 0539 7a69 3400 0000 0000 0000 5002 K..9zi4.......P.
0x0030: 0200 97ad 0000 ......
2008-08-14 12:21:12.212549 IP 10.10.75.1.31337 > 10.10.3.126.1337: R 0:0(0) ack
3288334337 win 0
0x0000: 000c 2945 914a 000c 294b dcf1 0800 4500 ..)E.J..)K....E.
0x0010: 0028 0000 4000 4006 d83d 0a0a 4b01 0a0a .(..@.@..=..K...
0x0020: 037e 7a69 0539 0000 0000 3400 0001 5014 .~zi.9....4...P.
0x0030: 0000 999a 0000 ......

Output truncated .....

When comes to examing the packet header, it's best to look at the pattern, and realizing that some fields are usually static in this case helps you to identify the different, if we look at the 4 packets above, you may spot

10.10.3.126 -> 10.10.75.1 - tcp sequence number
10.10.75.1 -> 10.10.3.126 - tcp acknowledge number(tcp sequence number + 1)

So to get the answer, you can just print the connection from one side(from 10.10.3.126 to 10.10.75.1) -

shell>tcpdump -XXttttnnr password.pcap ip src 10.10.3.126
2008-08-14 12:21:11.469308 IP 10.10.3.126.1337 > 10.10.75.1.31337: S 1879048192:
1879048192(0) win 512
0x0000: 000c 294b dcf1 000c 2945 914a 0800 4500 ..)K....)E.J..E.
0x0010: 0028 5c00 0000 4006 bc3d 0a0a 037e 0a0a .(\...@..=...~..
0x0020: 4b01 0539 7a69 7000 0000 0000 0000 5002 K..9zip.......P.
0x0030: 0200 5bad 0000 ..[...
2008-08-14 12:21:12.212445 IP 10.10.3.126.1337 > 10.10.75.1.31337: S 872415232:8
72415232(0) win 512
0x0000: 000c 294b dcf1 000c 2945 914a 0800 4500 ..)K....)E.J..E.
0x0010: 0028 2000 0000 4006 f83d 0a0a 037e 0a0a .(....@..=...~..
0x0020: 4b01 0539 7a69 3400 0000 0000 0000 5002 K..9zi4.......P.
0x0030: 0200 97ad 0000 ......
2008-08-14 12:21:12.959563 IP 10.10.3.126.1337 > 10.10.75.1.31337: S 603979776:6
03979776(0) win 512
0x0000: 000c 294b dcf1 000c 2945 914a 0800 4500 ..)K....)E.J..E.
0x0010: 0028 6200 0000 4006 b63d 0a0a 037e 0a0a .(b...@..=...~..
0x0020: 4b01 0539 7a69 2400 0000 0000 0000 5002 K..9zi$.......P.
0x0030: 0200 a7ad 0000 ......
2008-08-14 12:21:13.656942 IP 10.10.3.126.1337 > 10.10.75.1.31337: S 889192448:8
89192448(0) win 512
0x0000: 000c 294b dcf1 000c 2945 914a 0800 4500 ..)K....)E.J..E.
0x0010: 0028 8d00 0000 4006 8b3d 0a0a 037e 0a0a .(....@..=...~..
0x0020: 4b01 0539 7a69 3500 0000 0000 0000 5002 K..9zi5.......P.
0x0030: 0200 96ad 0000 ......

Output truncated .....

If you want to see another side of the traffic, just tune the bpf filter to ip src 10.10.75.1, however for that you will need to look at the acknowledge number. You should have the answer now.

Anyway when comes to print certain field in the header, you can use tshark(part of wireshark), and force it to print certain field, for example -

shell>tshark -Tfields -e 'tcp.seq' -nr password.pcap -o tcp.relative_sequence_numbers:FALSE -R 'ip.src == 10.10.3.126'
1879048192
872415232
603979776
889192448
1996488704
805306368
1912602624
1677721600
536870912
822083584
889192448
536870912
822083584
838860800
855638016
167772160

That's your answer in decimal, you can convert the number to hex and from hex to ascii. Using pythong quickies -

Decimal to Hex -
shell>python -c 'print hex()'

HeX to Ascii
shell>python -c 'import binascii; print binascii.a2b_hex("")'

You should have the passphrase to unrar Questions.rar

shell>unrar e Questions.rar

Bump in the passphrase and you will be able to retrieve all the files you need.

During the challenge event, I don't see any participants use HeX for this purpose. And lot of them just use wireshark to examine, my opinion is using wireshark is not effective in this scenario as wireshark is great when you want to do per packet examination or dealing with network protocols you are not familiar with. However for this, I would say tcpdump and tshark are more effective tools to obtain the clue.

Enjoy (;])

Little note about GDB

This is just for myself as I'm not the guy who uses debugger much. However sometimes it helps when you have core dump for the program you are running. This is simple one of what you can examine with the core dump file.

shell>gdb bro bro.core
GNU gdb 6.1.1 [FreeBSD]
Copyright 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are
welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions.
Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB. Type "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "i386-marcel-freebsd"...
Core was generated by `bro'.
Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault.
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libmagic.so.3...done.
Loaded symbols for /usr/lib/libmagic.so.3
Reading symbols from /lib/libz.so.4...done.
Loaded symbols for /lib/libz.so.4
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libssl.so.5...done.
Loaded symbols for /usr/lib/libssl.so.5
Reading symbols from /lib/libcrypto.so.5...done.
Loaded symbols for /lib/libcrypto.so.5
Reading symbols from /lib/libncurses.so.7...done.
Loaded symbols for /lib/libncurses.so.7
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6...done.
Loaded symbols for /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6
Reading symbols from /lib/libm.so.5...done.
Loaded symbols for /lib/libm.so.5
Reading symbols from /lib/libgcc_s.so.1...done.
Loaded symbols for /lib/libgcc_s.so.1
Reading symbols from /lib/libc.so.7...done.
Loaded symbols for /lib/libc.so.7
Reading symbols from /libexec/ld-elf.so.1...done.
Loaded symbols for /libexec/ld-elf.so.1
#0 0x080518ef in copy_string () at SSLInterpreter.cc:30
30 */

(gdb) print copy_string
$1 = {} 0x80518d0

(gdb) bt
#0 0x080518ef in copy_string () at SSLInterpreter.cc:30
#1 0x0809e249 in DNS_Mapping (this=0x843e6c8,
host=0x810e00c1

, h=0x830c0d0)
at DNS_Mgr.cc:171
#2 0x080a049f in DNS_Mgr::AddResult (this=0x830bd68, dr=0x843e210,
r=0xbfbf9070) at DNS_Mgr.cc:697
#3 0x080a08d6 in DNS_Mgr::Resolve (this=0x830bd68) at DNS_Mgr.cc:601
#4 0x080a0edd in DNS_Mgr::LookupHost (this=0x830bd68,
name=0x843398e "l.root-servers.net") at DNS_Mgr.cc:485
#5 0x0806826a in brolex () at scan.l:330
#6 0x08053d5c in yyparse () at p.c:2277
#7 0x0804efb6 in main (argc=5, argv=0xbfbfebac) at main.cc:751

(gdb) up
#1 0x0809e249 in DNS_Mapping (this=0x843e6c8,
host=0x810e00c1

, h=0x830c0d0)
at DNS_Mgr.cc:171
171 req_host = copy_string(host);

I'm still learning how to interpret them correctly, hopefully more to come.

Cheers ;]

FreeBSD: Bpfstat is in Netstat

My friend Richard(Taosecurity) has blogged about bpfstat here, and for now bpfstat is already ported as part of netstat in FreeBSD 7. You can run the netstat with -B option -

shell>netstat -B -I le0

Pid Netif Flags Recv Drop Match Sblen Hblen Command
820 le0 p--s--- 989344 0 958346 0 0 bro
761 le0 p--s--- 989444 0 989444 216 0 argus
754 le0 p--s--- 410 0 410 1392 0 ourmon
330 le0 -ifs--l 989458 0 440 0 0 dhclient

As you can see it is very useful when comes to monitor the libpcap based tools, however there's one feature I miss during the time I use bpfstat which is -i(interval of wait second to report). To simulate similar function, I have found a simple way by using infinite loops -

shell>z=1; while [ $z -eq 1 ]; do netstat -B -I le0; sleep 3; done

This way it will report every 3 seconds(sleep 3), and if you just want to monitor particular tools, use grep will do.

Cheers ;]

HeX 2.0 RC1 is now

After long time development, we have finally reached the stage where we are brave enough to release version 2 of HeX, Release Candidate 1. This is the first public version for HeX 2.0 and we hope that by releasing this, people who are interested in it can help testing out this version. I won't be mentioning the new features that we are adding to HeX 2 here as I will put up all the information once we reach the 2.0 Release instead of RC. For the moment, we need people to test all the applications that we have added, a lot of them can be accessed via fluxbox menu so please help in testing.

Currently there are few known problems -

- Netdude is broken
- Autopsy is broken(sleuthkit issue)
- Gvim is broken(font not available)
- Flowtag is broken(Looking for older version of tk while new one is installed)
- NSM Console(Snort module where wrong path is defined in snort configuration file)
- Silktools(Flowcap and Rwflowpack)
- Ragraph is broken
- Zsh is missing

Most of the issues are already fixed in the development repository, therefore don't report to us if you encounter similar problem in HeX 2.0 RC1. If you encounter any other issues, please do report to us via mailing list -

http://groups.google.com/group/HeX-liveCD

Anyway here's the HeX 2.0 RC1 iso -

http://my.rawpacket.org/hex-i386-2.0-RC1-20080803.iso
http://my.rawpacket.org/hex-i386-2.0-RC1-20080803.iso.md5
http://my.rawpacket.org/hex-i386-2.0-RC1-20080803.iso.sha256

Alternatively, you can download from US mirror -

http://us.rawpacket.org/image/hex-i386-2.0-RC1-20080803.iso

Thanks to all the raWPacket members who have put the effort in HeX 2.0 development, you guys are walys rocking!

Enjoy (;])

Unimas: Open Source Security Tools Talks

First of all, thanks for the invitation from Unimas, and En. Ahmad who has put the effort to make it happen, me and Mel will be going to University Malaysia Sarawak (Unimas) tomorrow to give talks about Open Source Security Tools and how it can be very useful, either for corporate, or educational environment.

If you are interested in the topic, and you are currently studying in Unimas. Feel free to join us!

Enjoy ;]

Ubuntu: Netdude Manual Installation

I use netdude for pcap file editing, it's simple and straightforward since it is gui based, however the ubuntu package is rather old(0.3.x) and I need to use the latest version, here's quick way to get the latest version of netdude installed on Ubuntu 8.04.

Download the latest version of netdude, libpcapnav and libnetdude from here -

http://netdude.sourceforge.net/download.html

Then install all the necessary packages -

shell>sudo apt-get install stow

shell>sudo apt-get install build-essential

shell>sudo apt-get install libgtk1.2-dev

shell>sudo apt-get install libpcap0.7-dev

Decompress netdude, libpcapnav and libnetdude, and install them following the sequence - libpcapnav, libnetdude and netdude. It should be prety quick to get it done.

Enjoy ;]

EmergingBro: HowTo

First of all, make sure you have Bro installed on your machine, or you can download it at http://bro-ids.org. If you are using HeX, Bro is installed by default. Once installed, you may find the directory structure of Bro looks like this -

shell>ls -la

total 34
drwxr-xr-x 15 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 17:36 ./
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 512 Jul 10 07:51 ../
drwxr-xr-x 2 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 07:51 archive/
drwxr-xr-x 2 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 17:35 bin/
drwxr-xr-x 2 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 17:39 etc/
drwxr-xr-x 2 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 17:35 include/
drwxr-xr-x 2 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 17:35 lib/
drwxr-xr-x 3 analyzt wheel 1024 Jul 10 18:01 logs/
drwxr-xr-x 3 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 17:36 perl/
drwxr-xr-x 3 analyzt wheel 5120 Jul 10 17:59 policy/
drwxr-xr-x 2 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 07:51 reports/
drwxr-xr-x 2 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 17:36 scripts/
drwxr-xr-x 4 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 07:51 share/
drwxr-xr-x 2 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 11 22:50 site/
drwxr-xr-x 2 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 07:51 var/

Please take note on few important directories -

policy directory contains all the policy and analysis scripts with the file extension .bro.

site directory contains site policy files which you can define or configure for specific site.

logs directory contains all the log files that are generated by bro.

etc directory contains bro configuration files, for start up and bro environment variable settings.

Obtain the latest signatures from Emerging Bro -

shell>cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.emergingthreats.net:/cvsroot/bro co emerging-bro

shell>cd emerging-bro

shell>ls -l

total 14
drwxr-xr-x 7 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 07:58 ./
drwxr-xr-x 4 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 07:55 ../
drwxr-xr-x 2 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 11:23 CVS/
drwxr-xr-x 3 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 07:58 CVSROOT/
drwxr-xr-x 3 analyzt wheel 1024 Jul 10 18:24 rules/
drwxr-xr-x 4 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 18:28 scripts/
drwxr-xr-x 17 analyzt wheel 512 Jul 10 11:23 sigs/

sigs directory contains all the individual signature in different category

rules directory contains main signature file for each category. For example emerging-bro-malware.sig contains all the signatures for MALWARE category.

scripts directory contains all the policy and analysis scripts that are contributed by the community members.

To perform quick test, you can use invoke the signature file using command line option -

Set Bro environment variables -

shell>. bro.cfg

Execute Bro -

shell>bro -s emerging-bro-all.sig -r whatever.pcap `hostname`

If you plan to run it in long term, it's best to edit the file generated during make install-brolite. The file name starts with your hostname, for example it is raWPacket.bro in HeX liveCD since my hostname is raWPacket. Just edit the following section in the file -

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
# To run signatures, uncomment the following line.
# @load brolite-sigs

@ifdef ( use_signatures )
# Load Bro signatures. This is the default file containing Bro
# signatures.
redef signature_files += "signatures";
@endif
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

To this -

@load brolite-sigs

redef signature_files += "emerging-bro-all.sig"

Please do note that other policy scripts must be loaded in order to have signatures invoked properly especially brolite.bro.

Enjoy ;]

DefCraft: Official Launching

After long consideration, I decide to start a company that focuses on security research, development and consultancy. The company name is straightforward - Defensive Craft (DefCraft).

The company offers a wide range of consulting services for specific domains, here's the list -

• Network and Web Application Security Assessment
• Network Security Architecture Planning & Deployment
• Network Security Monitoring Implementation
• Network Security Architecture Auditing
  
• Network Device Testing & Evaluation
• Network Based Forensics
• Network Profiling Operation
• Incident Response & Handling
• Digital Security Training

If you have any inquiry, please feel free to contact me.

Contact Number: 016 415 9873
Contact Email: defcraft at gmail dot com

For more information, you can check out at -

http://www.defcraft.net

The company has its own blog too which we will blog about what we do behind the lab -

http://blog.defcraft.net

On the other hand, I will still contribute my free time to various open source projects that I'm working on since this is part of company principle I'm emphasizing.

Emerging Bro

I'm sured not many have heard of Bro comparing to Snort in NIDS arsenal, while both are actually applying different approach in intrusion detection, they are the Open Source NIDS I like to use to complement each others in different setup and deployment.

I'm now working closely with Matt Jonkman from EmergingThreats(ET) to start the new project calls Emerging-Bro, basically the project is about converting set of latest signatures from Snort to Bro so that Bro operators can take advantage of it. You can find more information from the announcement here -

http://www.emergingthreats.net/content/view/80/1/

If you are Bro operators, you might have question of why I'm doing this as Bro is more focused on policy and analysis script development to detect network event(be it normal or abnormal) instead of relying on signatures matching in byte stream. There are reasons why I'm doing this and I'm going to explain here -

Edge
Emerging-Bro will only focus on latest or critical signatures from ET, therefore the project is basically more concerning about latest/critical attacks because most networks are more vulnerable to newly discovered attacks than the old one, therefore detecting and preventing them at network boundary is much important. Currently there are about 100 latest signatures converted from ET to Emerging-Bro, and if you think certain Snort signature should be included, please do let me know.

Leverage
The signature set that is developed by EmergingThreats usually give little time window for attacker and reduce the outbreak period significantly, hence you can pretty quick in detecting initial stage of new attacks. Bro operators can take advantage of this if they can monitor the new attack in time and quickly develope more complete detection scheme with Bro policy scripts.

Requests
Yes, according to Matt, there are requests about it, on and off there are people in Bro mailing list asking about the availability of Bro signatures, so why not doing it to help the community?

I think these gives enough reasons for me to work on the project. But providing latest signatures is not the end of Emerging-Bro, I greatly appreciate the help from Seth Hall to step up and discuss with me about the direction of the project and we both agree that it should be the platform for people to share or contribute their policy/analysis scripts as well. Currently he has his own development repository here and I will import them to Emerging-Bro.

For the moment, you can access and download all the signatures at -

http://www.emergingthreats.net/bro/

Enough for now, and this project is also part of the reason why I'm not much blogging last two weeks as I have paid my free time to it. I would like to thank Matt and Seth for the collaboration works, and also Bro developers for their endorsement!

Cheers (;])

Davix: Review

From Davix's main site -

DAVIX, a live CD for data analysis and visualization, brings the most important free tools for data processing and visualization to your desk. There's no hassle with installing an operating system or struggle to build the necessary tools to get started with visualization. You can completely dedicate your time to data analysis.

The clause above is definitely right above Davix liveCD!!!!!

When people ask me which liveCD I use frequently, I always advocate these 3 -

1. HeX liveCD (Network Based Forensics)
2. BackTrack liveCD (Penetration Testing)
3. Helix liveCD (Digital Forensics)

I have mentioned many times that I prefer liveCD which focuses on specific domain very well, and Davix is really one of those. Undoubtedly I would love to include Davix to my CD folder.

Before I start anything serious, lets view the screenshot after startup from the liveCD -

It's based on SLAX, and I guess most of people know how good SLAX is after trying out BackTrack, DAVIX takes advantage of SLAX modularity, stability and hardware supports, I have tested it with my own hardwares and it works pretty well.

If you are familiar with linux desktop solution, you will definitely recognize that it is using KDE from the screenshot. Though I'm not fan of KDE, but KDE is always simple and easy to use for general users. Many of system configuration can be done via gui so it saves a lot of hassle figuring how to get the system working for you.

On top of that, DAVIX offers very informative resources for users to have great kickstart in learning data capturing, processing and visualization by providing a set of firefox bookmark toolbars, you can easily access all the information requires to study the topic, this can reduce time in studying certain tools and learning visualization techniques, and it also saves you from googling hassle. I like the idea of toolbars organization in firefox.

On the other hand, DAVIX also comes with its own manual which is about 108 pages, you can access it via KDE menu -> DAVIX -> DAVIX Manual. If you are serious about learning data visualization with DAVIX, I suggest you to start with its manual instead of playing around with the desktop without knowing what to do. It contains the basic guide of how to use all the tools that are delivered in DAVIX, the best part is you can follow the manual and learn it practically with all the tools available in DAVIX.

There are 3 main categories listed in Kde menu, they are Capture, Process, and Visualize. The Capture contains tools for you to perform data logging, especially network data. The Process contains tools to perform data processing so that the output of data processed can be parsed by visualization tools. The Visualize mainly contains all the tools for you to visualize the data set by generating different kind of images, diagrams or graphs. As I have mentioned you can just learn all the tools shipped by DAVIX with the comprehensive manual itself.

So what are the tools shipped with DAVIX, there are way too many that I can cover here, however here are my favourites -

1. Rumint
2. Tnv
3. Afterglow
4. Inetvis
5. Etherape
6. Gnuplot
7. Rrdtools
8. Mrtg
9. Wireshark

This is more to preference thingy as I have used those tools previously and familiar with them, I will need to explore the potential of other tools which I never use before. If you want to learn how those tools work, you can actually refer to the DAVIX manual, and then refer to the data set example which you can properly find in /usr/local/share/*, different tools may support different kind of data formats so that may require some learning curves. But the real question lies in what kind of visualization techniques should be applied to the data set you have so that it makes most sense.

After talking about all the good things, I still think there are few things worth improved.

1. Log sample
As this is the liveCD for data analysis and visualization, except that it has the example data set in /usr/local/share/*, it should provide a set of sample logs(apache, postfix, exim, proftpd and etc). Then demonstrating how to format them to feed those visualization tools will be great.

2. Fat taskbar
You may notice in the screenshot that the taskbar is quite big(double taskbar), this is nothing wrong, but if I have to offer a liveCD for visualization purpose, I would prefer to have everything slicker to give bigger space to display the images that I have generated from the data.

3. Unified keyboard shortcut
This is just my idea, when I work with images, I always like to zoom in and out. Zooming in allows you to focus on detail, zooming out on the other hand can improve macro view to understand the ratio or distribution of data. I do know different tools have always defined different keyboard shortcut layout. If zoom(in/out) uses same set of shortcut key settings across all the tools in DAVIX, that would be really great. I'm glad DAVIX offers gqview as the main application to display images as that's my favorite one with its ease of use interface.

4. Installer
Currently it comes with BackTrack Installer which is quite experimental, it needs some works to get it installed, I have tested the installer and it works fine(if you know what you are doing), I'm looking forward for easy installer in future.

By the way, one might ask why should I use DAVIX, simple enough. Take the old cliche "A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words". Using correct visualization techniques to process your thousand lines log files, to be honest you can do more with less, it saves your times and brain power to focus on something more important.

Guess I should end my review about DAVIX here, in case you are interested to try out DAVIX -

DAVIX is also part of Raffael's upcoming book Applied Security Visualization which will be published by Addision Wesley.

Currently, DAVIX is only available to beta testers. To participate in testing, please contact jan.monsch at iplosion.com

Thanks to DAVIX development team for allowing me to participate in beta testing, later is better than never. I do know developing a liveCD require hard works if you want to build a solid one, kudos!

Update Note:
DAVIX developer Jan. P. Monsch has informed me that he has actually making the taskbar more slicker now in new version of Davix, thanks for taking positively on my input.

Enjoy (;])

Snort 3.0 Beta

If you are interested to check out what's offered by latest Snort, now you have it. Kudos to snort development team!!!!!

http://www.snort.org/dl/snortsp/

I haven't tried that out personally yet, but you should!

Enjoy ;]

Earthquake? or Storm .....

The terrible disaster .....

The beijing.exe is actually the storm variant, I thought they are making use of festivals only, it seems they don't even let any single chance going with the use of disaster(popularity counts), that's going too far from humanity.

If you run it, it's really disaster!

Peace :[

For Real?

It's year 2008 now, but .....

ZzZzzzz .....

Peace ;]

Good Read on Bro's Signature Engine

The ICIR blog is always informative, and I'm quite please with the latest post about Bro's Signature Engine.

I just learned few things that I don't know from the post, and it appears that Bro uses flex's regular expression syntax. It is important to understand which condition to use when writing the signature .

Otherwise, take the good read on Things To Keep In Mind When Writing Signatures, that section is particularly useful if you are interested to write Bro sigs.

Peace ;]

Forensics Tools

I have to do some forensics work, and the tools below are very handy -

http://www.afflib.org/

http://www.pyflag.net/cgi-bin/moin.cgi

http://ftimes.sourceforge.net/FTimes/

http://p2pmarshal.atc-nycorp.com/

Cheers ;]

M$: Server Hardening & Auditing

Don't laugh, sometimes you have to deal with this whether you like it or not.

I'm looking for tools to perform M$ Windows Server Hardening & Auditing, I know Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer and IIS Lockdown but are there other tools you use to assist you in Hardening & Auditing operation such as hardening regedit keys, auditing Active Directory and so forth.

If your job is managing M$ Server Farm, how do you perform your task to make sure all servers have same set of configuration and policy, and they are all monitored properly?

I would like to hear from you, and recommend me good tools and methods of doing these. There's no real secure OS, there's only capable or bullshit sysadmin!

Wake up sysadmin, system security is part of your job .....

Enjoy ;]