Sun, 11 Jul 2004
Hope is a very cool place, here are more notes.
Sunday Panels
18:00 Cult of the Dead Cow hactivism panel
The theme of their presentation (even though I left for an hour because I was tipping over from hunger) was Internet access through out the world. The first country of focus was China.
Hacking China seems like a pretty big deal. Internet access is limited by the government and the web starts with deny all and government approved web sites are whitelisted, essentially making the web no longer public and free. She called on hackers from around the world to devise solutions to this problem and break through China's restrictions and provide a public service to the world, essentially to liberate China's 1.3 billion citizens.
How is the public involved in filtering policy on the Internet? You can trace back who is making the decisions about what content gets filtered and for what reason they can be entered into a networked database. This can map the relations into a traceable system. Policy can be altered and patterns can be identified as the database expands.
University of tornoto has a hactivism lab that anaylizes how different ISP throught the world block and filter their citizen's web access. Many countries in Asia that have dictatorial governments participate in web filtering. Most of these countries buy their filtering software through American distributers, who most likely aren't concerned with their target audience rights.
- Uzbekistan uses redirects to push their users away from controversial sites
- Saudi Arabia has a blocked page notice with a unblocking request form
- Myanmar uses a blacklist
The commercial blocking software uses flawed automatic keyword categorization from a pre-defined index that has lots of false positives. The moral of the story is keyword blocking systems suck and they will trap your from viewing legitimate content.
20:00 Breaking Corporate Restristions from the Inside
Wrap your outgoing packets with a port that you know is allowed out of the LAN and send it to a second proxy on the Internet that you have set up which is listening on port 80. This can then unwrap the wrapped TCP packet and forward it to it's destination. There are three computers in the equation, whereas no-proxied port forwarding requires two. The thrid in this equation is the proxy server that's shutting you out. htc -P proxy:8080 -F 8000:proxy2:80. Then on the proxy2 server, the unwrapping is done with a server.
21:00 Hacker Radio and Video
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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.
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