Sat, 10 Jul 2004
HOPE 5 is a very cool place. There are my notes about it.
Saturday Pannels
13:00 What is grid computing
Grids are a collectionof computers that are hetrogrounous platforms and archetectures. It seems like there's a movement to
build fast ass clusters over high latency networks (i.e. the Internet). So what the hell can we do with
these things and how are they unique?
For one, they can deal with massive supercomputing grids.
The speaker is showing specs of 30 + terabyte filesystems and 13 terabytes of RAM. He said this one
system that's he logging into is actually composed of 1500 nodes. Obviously there's quite a large
security issue here.
Some good ideas I've got from this is software called Globus, which is a java
app that is horribly difficult to install. The speaker is using OpenSSL and a certificate server which
automates extremely fine-grained comtrol over certificates for each host in the grid. He pointed me to
a program named CA.pl, which is a Perl script that is included with the standard OpenSSL library.
16:00 Kismet pannel with the author
Kismet is far cooler than I thought. It can capture raw packat data from a variety of wireless
cards. This means that you can grab a bunck of packets and decrypt them later, essentially getting on
an encrypted wireless network. It's also good for getting more detail out of the available networks
your card can see. Kismet will compile on OS X but if you don't want to install
custom drivers and use
the Ncurses terminal interface, there's
Kismac which crashed on me the first
time but looks good. There's also
Macstumbler
which is a much smaller simpler stumbler.
Kismet has some
very specific
hardware requirements since his development platform is Linux many
cards don't want to open their drivers since WI-FI is big business and thei're scared of the "crazy
hackers".
So now the big question is getting an integrated graphical system for joining and storing networks
like Apple provides in OS X. While no where near as powerful as iwconfig and kismet in the terminal,
Apple made it butt simple to scan, view and join all the networks in your antenna's range. If it
doesn't like the network you just joined, it'll tell you why and prompt for a password if it's using
WEP.
posted at: 00:00 | path:
/hacking/hope5 |
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