John Preston’s Website

I finally got around to running a 3DMark Vantage benchmark on my new PC, Ares, and the results are now online. You can get the results here, and I think you’ll agree my new system is pretty sweet ;-).

I came up with a good idea for boycotting censorship a while ago: on one day, every year, people around the world do not speak for 24 hours, and wear duct-tape over their mouths with the word “censorship” written on it. The day will be October 10th (or 10/10). Please join us in boycotting censorship around the world. There is a talk on core.onion for IDAC (talk number 1584). More info to come.

Finally, after nearly a month and a half, my server is back up, and is now living in my dining room. A few ‘technical difficulties’ last week took my server down, and prevented me from getting it back up, until now. It’s just in time as well, as I have some announcements. Firstly, I have decided to drop TorN, as the project wasn’t going anywhere, nobody has showed any interest, and it’s redundant because of the Tor’s normal hidden services network. All in all, it was just a (proof of) concept, and the page will still continue to exist for historical purposes and reference. Next, I’d like to announce a new project (one door closes, another door opens!), which is currently still in the alpha (or ’still-thinking-about-it-and-am-not-sure-what-it-actually-is-yet’) stage. Currently it’s called “Lots of People Shouting at Once”, which explains the basic idea. I was thinking about anonynimity in communications, and thought “If lots of people were standing in a room, shouting out encrypted messages, nobody could tell who each message was for, or who was recieving them.”. I’m currently thinking about implementation methods, and I plan on getting some basic info up on a project page soon, but no promises yet. Anyway, enjoy the site and my services (until the next month and a half downtime, that is!).

The Open Rights Group, who I’ve mentioned before, are running a fundraising event at Open Tech 2008. Their aim is to reach 1,500 (£5 per month) donators, which is double their current value of 750. The ORG have been reffered to as “the EFF of the UK”, and they protect the rights of bloggers and digital citizens around the world. By donating, you can help the Open Rights Group protect your rights for years to come, even if it’s just a one-off donation of £10. More information can be found on their page here.

A couple of years ago, I ‘invented’ a ‘game’ called camspotting. The idea revolves around the ability to use Google to find unsecured webcams and IP security cameras on the internet. The objective is to find someone, on one of these webcams, matching a certain description. This makes it ideal to be played on forums. For example, someone may post a topic that says “Camspot a man with dark, long hair and a briefcase in 24 hours.”. In order to “win”, you have to post a picture first, within the 24 hour time limit. It can be surprisingly fun, and it’s a great way to pass the time when you’re bored because you can do ’speed matches’, without time limits, and very loose descriptions, meaning they only take a few minutes. Speed matches are especially good in IRC. Below are a few links to information on finding webcams with Google. Happy camspotting!

http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2005/01/09/security-webcam-hunting.html

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=198836

http://www.i-hacked.com/content/view/81/42/

This is a little software collection I’ve been working on for the past couple of days. It’s a compilation of various softwares,  and some useful batch scripts I’ve written, intended to simplify the creation and use of one-time pads. All of the programs included are command-line, and come as Windows binaries. I’ve included the source code for all of them (excluding the UUencoder and UUdecoder, because that’s standard on UNIX systems) so that *nix users can compile and use them too. I hacked around with the source for the generator (”otp”) to orient it more to electronic one-time pads, as it was originally intended for use by hand. Enjoy.

Paranoid Joe’s One-Time Pad Kit (ZIP file)

My website’s been down for the past couple of days, because of a short power outage. About 2 o’clock on Sunday (25th) the power died, so I went to shut down my server, because it would only last 30 minutes on the UPS, and I didn’t have it plugged in to the control port and configured to shut down automatically. Unfortunately, I also didn’t have it configured to shut down when the power button was pressed, but to open a prompt, and the monitor wasn’t on the UPS. When my dad finally managed to get the monitor plugged in, because it’s a CRT, it caused the 50-year-old UPS to crash, draining all of its power in one go, and killing the server anyway. Don’t worry, it doesn’t end there, because the next day we were shifting stuff around the garage, and the office was blocked up with junk, so I couldn’t get to it. Finally, today, everything was done and we decided the UPS would be charged up enough, so we turned it on again. WHIRRRRR-CLICK-VRRROOooooommm. The UPS is completely dead, even the pass-through isn’t working, so now my server is on a tiny brick of a UPS, intended just to keep the routers up for Vonage, meaning it will last 5 minutes if the power goes down again. Yey.

Now, after 2 days, it’s operational again (just). Enjoy until the next power failure.

I’ve been quite busy today, polishing off USME. Now it’s got some filtering for PGP in it, I’ve split up the forums so there’s a separate one for public keys, and it’s now available on the Tor hidden service network at dj3xtjynxuzrz32u.onion. Enjoy .

Last night after watching Men In Black, I started thinking about a secure messaging system, that enabled users to anonymously post and retrieve messages nobody else could read, with a few little extras thrown in, built out of common tools already in place, and this is what I came up with.

The first thing I had to think about is what kind of attacks could someone place on a messaging system. In order for my system to be considered secure by myself, it had to have:-

• Encryption on a message scale. This should be integrated with a PKI, so that a symmetrical decipherment key doesn’t have to be exchanged, which could be compromised. Encrypting the message prevents unwanted people from reading it, and for this, I chose PGP/GPG.
• Encryption on a transport scale. This adds a little more security, and prevents passive network-level attacks, so people can’t see what message you’re trying to read. This could easily be accomplished through endpoint encryption in Tor.
• Anonymity. By having anonymity, it becomes impossible for someone to link messages and contacts to you. This is implemented by not having user accounts and allowing anonymous access, and using Tor to hide the originating IP address.

Now that I had all the higher-level stuff in place to make it secure, I had to decide upon a transport mechanism. In the end, I chose NNTP, because a news reader can be configured to download all of the messages from a given group, and messages can then be filtered offline. This helped with anonymity, because it prevents someone from distinguishing which message is targeted towards you. I also decided that the system should be ran as a Tor hidden service, otherwise data transmission isn’t encrypted end-to-end.

I call it “USME” (pronounced “Use me”), an acronym for “Ultra Secure Message Exchange”. Currently, I’m fiddling around with NNTP servers, trying to get one up for a little public beta testing. The service has the following advantages:-

• All messages are encrypted in a very secure fashion, so other people can’t read them.
• Providing your newsreader is configured to download all messages and then work offline, an attacker cannot target a message to you.
• As all messages are encrypted, it’s easy to flood the database with dummy encrypted messages, that an attacker would have to pilfer through, but a genuine user wouldn’t, because they could just search through message topics for some identifying mark other people would use, such as a nickname, or the MD5 hash of a string.
• All traffic is encrypted, preventing traffic analysis.
• Because all traffic is router through Tor, all parties are anonymous to one another, preventing rogue contacts from discovering your identity.

I’d love to hear some peoples’ thoughts on this, especially any attacks one could possibly execute on the system.

UPDATE (10/04/08): I’ve spent all day playing around with NNTP servers, and I just can’t find a server that can do all the stuff I want. Eventually, I gave up, and started looking at different web forums, and I finally decided on PunBB, which I’ve now hacked at and customised to my specific needs. You can find the test USME installation here. In the mean time, I’m going to look into setting up a hidden service on the public Tor network. I’ve also decided to add this as a ‘project’, meaning a link to this article can now be found on the Projects page. If I decide to do anything with this, I may add it as a separate page, and start working on it a little more. At the moment, the only thing I can think that the system needs is a filter built into the reply and post forms to make sure that people are posting PGP encrypted material.

Chances are you’ve got a wireless hotspot in your home, and you’re probably reading this over your wireless connection. If you live in a major metropolitan area, such as a city, open up your wireless network list and look at all the available access points. Since its conception, the use of wireless systems for networking has steadily been growing, and now nearly every house with Internet access uses a wireless router. But what most people don’t realise is that wireless Internet access is a haven for hackers, warez d00dz, and various other nasty people.

A good percentage of access points are completely open, with no authentication or encryption at all. In my experience of wardriving, I’d say about 25%-35% of all the APs I see are open. Most of my wardrives last about 1 hour, so if I say I travel 20 miles on a single wardrive, and pick up 100 APs, that’s at least 5 open access points per mile. If you have an open AP, that is an invitation for hackers, because it shows everyone that you have very little security knowledge, as is true of most home users. If a hacker can connect to your wireless access point, then he’s on your network, and he can then proceed to hack boxes, or perform passive network attacks, meaning he can potentially grab e-mails, bank account information, and other things.

Yes, there are forms of encryption available, and you can filter access to your AP by MAC address, but all of these are fallible. A big chunk of users still use WEP security, which has been crackable for quite a while now. Even when people use WPA or WPA2 encryption, they often choose a stupid password, such as the name of the access point. Anybody with the skill and determination to crack your AP probably can, unless you’re using a random, long passphrase, coupled with WPA or WPA2 (or you can use WPA(2) ‘enterprise’, which uses certificates, but from what I’ve heard, it’s a pain to set up).

But probably the worst, and most abused, thing WiFi can be used for is to provide people with anonymity. If I wanted to go and hack a box, or upload my latest warez, I would definitely use my neighbour’s WiFi, or go wardriving for a little bit and park outside a house. It would be faster than using a proxy, such as Tor, for example, and it’s easier. Plus, if you spoof your MAC address (which isn’t really required), and use random locations, it’s near untraceable. If you have a high-gain antenna (such as a Cantenna, or WokFi), then you don’t even need to leave home. The only person who’d get in trouble would be the operator of the AP, unless they can prove it wasn’t them.

WiFi is public, like any other radio-based communication technology. You can eavesdrop and utilise other peoples’, without ever having to plug in a wire. Ease of use and security go together in a negative correlation, and the only real way to protect yourself is to not use WiFi; it’s only a matter of time before WPA and WPA2 are cracked. Although, if you want the best of both worlds, you could just build a giant Faraday cage around your house, although I don’t think your local council would be happy .