Ok, so I occassionally watch a video game show on G4TV called XPlay and they run a segment called The Will Wright Minute. Will Wright, of course, is the legendary game designer who created Sim City and The Sims. In any event the XPlay folks have created a very clever opening song to introduce Will Wrights segment and as soon as I heard it; I wanted it as a ringtone! Watch the embedded video below (the beginning) to see what I'm talking about.  

My wife was in the hospital for 4 days this past week and at the end of the first day my wife felt well enough to sit up and she wanted to log into her myspace page to post some photos. The hospital offered free Wi-fi internet access for staff and patients but they run a WebSense firewall which blocks just about every site online other than email sites and internal Sentara intranet sites. We tried about 25 sites and all but 4 were blocked by the firewall. You can see the screenshot below.

We tried several online proxies such as proxify.com but all of those were blocked as well as sites that outline steps for bypassing firewall filters. Ultimately, I left the hospital that night when my wife fell asleep and I went home to stand up a SOCKS SSH proxy server.

I don't have a full blown Linux server running at the house so I used my Windows 2003 Enterprise Web Server to host the OpenSSH server. 

The steps went like this:

• Install Cygwin in Windows 2003 with OpenSSH, vim, & diffutils 
• Set /var writeable for all (chmod 777 /var)
• Set /etc/passwd & /etc/group as readable (chmod +r /etc/passwd)
• Run the SSH install script (ssh-host-config)
• Answered the questions in the script allowing a service account to be created and an NTService for SSH server

After the server was installed, I went to my client and installed PuTTY which is used to create the encrypted tunnel from the client to the server. See the instructions here. Once the SSH session has been established all that's left is to configure firefox to use the tunnel as a SOCKS proxy.

Now that the tunnel was functional, I ran wireshark to sniff the traffic in order to validate that this setup wasn't going to set off alarms by the hospital admins. Wireshark revealed that firefox was leaking DNS requests, which means that even though my tunnel was fetching the remote sites, it was sending DNS requests to the host network DNS (which would setup a huge red flag).

Luckily in FireFox you canstop this behavior by typing about:config into the web browser and editting the setting network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true.

I unplugged the laptop, set a port forwarding rule in my smoothwall router for inbound ssh traffic, and returned to the hospital and hooked it into the network there. Everything worked perfectly. 

  I have become very interested in embedded systems lately so I've been experimenting with ideas for things I could do with embedded systems. For example, detect temperatures, heat, humidity, motion, movement, etc and take logical actions based on such detection. The key ingredient for these types of implementations is the micro-controller, which is a tiny chip capable of turning current on and off based on input and output (I/O). I have started my first project and created my first circuit which you can see below. I have a program running on my work computer which traps certain events such as new email, instant messages, meeting notices, etc, etc and when new events are trapped, the application tells the circuit to blink certain LEDs in a specific sequence.

If anyone wants the schematics or code just let me know. 

  A collegue and I headed out to Las Vegas this past weekend to attend DEFCON 16, the worlds largest annual hacker convention. Aside from the fact that it was held in Las Vegas (which is the scummiest place on Earth), DEFCON was fantastic. The high points for me included the hardware hacking panels and the new tools released at the CON. There was a talk from the Electronic Engineering team at the University of Delaware on creating hardware trojans that was impressive as well as the badge hacking talks and demonstrations in the Hardware Hacking Village.If you'd like to get the slide decks from all the talks contact me and let me know and I'll get the media to you. 

I won some great prizes at the conference like a complete Xilinx Spartan 3E FPGA kit!

You can see my photostream from DEFCON here 

A couple of the developers for the mp3-cms project met up at HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) this past weekend and we had a fantastic time. I wanted to run the mp3-cms on the HOPE network and give everyone there a chance to use it but we didn't have the resources to transport a server up to New York City and I was concerned that there might be some kind of copyright violation if I arrived in tow with a 100GB music collection running through our CMS available to everyone at the conference. We met several LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySql/PHP) developers at the conference who expressed keen interest in looking into our project so perhaps that will get us a little closer to a Linux capable version. 

The HOPE conference was great but I couldn't help but feeling that the vast majority of attendees were mere groupies or Law Enforcement as oppossed to real hackers. The MAKE, NYCResistor, and HacDC teams had impressive showings all weekend. For me personally my highlights were the Social Engineering, PenTesting with LiveCDs, Mitnik keynote, WikiScanner, and Laslow talks. 

Here are some photos I took at the conference