Saturday, November 30, 2019

Moloch's network authentication

Looks like it's time to switch to "tech writer" for a few days. Finally figured out why Moloch (think web version of Wireshark) wasn't accepting the network authentication. Moloch is a very nice tool (especially for teaching environments) but the install docs are a bit short.

The "hidden detail" was in how the reverse proxy mangles specific header variables (what goes into the proxy config isn't what is delivered to Moloch). Had to write a variable dump script before that was noticeable.

In any case, TC4 IDS students now have a very nice way to view captured packets.

Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Fixing Moloch's Hunt function for anonymous users

For those working with Moloch in single-user (anonymous) mode (where the passwordSecret line in config.ini is commented out), you may have noticed that the "Hunt" option doesn't work out-of-the box. Moloch will complain about the anonymous user not existing.

The fix is the obvious work-around (i.e., create the anonymous user). This can be accomplished from the command line, via:

/data/moloch/bin/moloch_add_user.sh anonymous "anonymous" PaSsW0rD

You'll never need to log in as the anonymous user so make the password difficult and don't re-use the password from one of your other accounts.

Saturday, November 23, 2019

Proactive to a (big) fault

Dealing with locked accounts today. My ISP account was locked due to inactivity (apparently pulling email doesn't count as "activity"). My Amazon account was locked due to my acquiring a new phone (6 months ago).

The Amazon account is unlocked, as is the ISP account, but the ISP account is still acting weird. ISP locked the customer account because of inactivity (apparently they don't consider paying their monthly bills as "activity" either). Care to guess how they notified me?

(For the above, if you guessed "via email to the locked account", you get 10K points!)

It's still not entirely fixed. I can send email to the ISP account from another ISP account but can't receive mail from anywhere else. Plus, my mail client has not been downloading any Kryptos group traffic for the better part of a year (thought the group had gotten quiet). Instead the traffic lands in the ISP inbox and is somehow invisible to my client. I'm seriously thinking about hosting email elsewhere.

Thursday, November 21, 2019

What I did with a week's vacation

Other than continuing to work (yeah, I know), I learned how to integrate OpenVirtualSwitch (OVS) and Docker, so that I could create an architecture that a professor has desired for the better part of a year.

Basically, I combined OVS, Docker, and Guacamole, so that each of 30 students could have a 3-node architecture consisting of a SSH host and a web server, with a VyOS firewall in between, and two virtual switches connecting everything together. I managed to pull it off on a machine with one CPU, consuming less than 10 GB of HD space and about 5 GB of memory. I imagine that one vCPU won't be able to keep up with stresses generated by 30 concurrently online students but so far, they've only been online 1 or 2 at a time. I can always add one (or more) on the fly.

The more I read about OVS, the more I like it. The next lab project will involve setting up an IDS environment, with two end points (one running tcpreplay) connected with a single virtual switch, which allows for port mirroring to a Snort container. Like the other project, Guacamole will run on top of this project (goal is to not require the student to have anything other than a browser).

I've not yet learned about SDN controllers but did manage to write a series of Perl scripts to do things like: deploy the containers, deploy the switches, connect the switches to the containers and connect them to Guacamole, and associate the Guacamole user accounts with the containers. Once the requisite software is installed and the Docker images are created, deployment of 30 private architectures only takes a few minutes (much quicker than cloning VMs).

If things go wrong and a student cannot correct their mistakes, the scripts are written so that a single student's architecture can be destroyed and redeployed. Additional scripts were written to check that all containers and switches are operating as they should.

The hard part was getting the three containers tweaked "just so". Such required making changes to a container, committing it to new container, destroying the old architecture, and redeploying the whole thing, using the new image. Scripting the process made it super easy.

Just in time for finals. Sorry guys!

Sunday, November 3, 2019

What was I reading in October 2019?

October was a busy month, what with being on travel for 2 weeks, participating in both the President's Cup and ODU's CyberOPS CTF events, as well as...

The Cubietruck finally kicked all four of its little feet up in the air. Instead of the SSD, it looks like NVRAM corruption (we've had some nasty brown-outs in October). It's back online. I used the repair as an excuse to weed out what I had running on that box.

The third hypervisor is back online, finally. The fix required blowing away the BIOS config and starting a new one (it wasn't accepting new drives). For now, it's running with about 5x the amount of storage that was previously on there.

In any case, this past month's (err... week's?) reading:

2019-10-22

- Potential bypass of Runas user restrictions
- Machine learning challenges at LinkedIn: Spark TensorFlow and beyond
- NordVPN confirms it was hacked
- Facebook Faked Viewer Metrics By As Much as 900 Percent
- Optimize your metadata for better compression
- Accidental Satellite Hijacks Can Rebroadcast Cell Towers
- jullrich/pcap2curl
- RandomAdversary/Awesome-AI-Security
- Quickpost: ExifTool OLE Files and FlashPix Files

2019-10-24

- Tails - Tails 4.0 is out
- Incorrect Working IPv6 NTP Clients/Networks
- Researcher Discovers Critical Linux WiFi Vulnerability That Existed For Four Years
- Debian Buster / OpenWRT 18.06.4 upgrade notes
- Objections to IoT regulation. A rational reply
- Weaponizing and Gamifying AI for WiFi Hacking: Presenting Pwnagotchi 1.0.0

2019-10-25

- Absurd fonts for an absurd world

2019-10-27

- How To Record Everything You Do In Terminal - I'm helping out with a project for school, and am reviewing Vagrant and Ansible capabilities as part of it.
- How to deploy a container with Ansible

2019-10-28

- 6 signs you might be a Linux user - #1 applies to all computer geeks. I'm guilty of #2, #3, and #4. If you're guilty of #5, yer a newb. I disagree with #6. A better one is that you've adapted other people's tools to suit your own needs.
- Searx - A New Internet Search Engine - Not really a new search engine. It's a search aggregator, meaning that you're still seeing Google Search results. Want you own search engine? Stand up Elastic or Sphinx Search and learn about FTS.

2019-10-30

- Gravitational Teleconsole - Looking at this (and Teleport) for use as part of the school project.

2019-10-31

- suchja/wine - still more stuff for the school project
- The single most useful thing in bash - 25 years later, I'm still learning new things about Bash!
- Tmux Tutorial
- adblockradio/adblockradio - At this point I'll try it, if only to mute the barrage of attack ads.

Above was generated by a homegrown bolt-on script for Wallabag, which is a free utility for capturing web content so that it can be read later.