Hackery

Open source detritus

• Implement handling of C99 variadic macros in splint (see this, this and of course this)
• Review cryptographic implementations in pidgin -- last time I looked (back in the bad ol' gaim days), its usage of OpenSSL was all FUBAR
• Subversion's --xml and --ignore-externals options couldn't be used together properly in svn status, at some point. Investigate, rectify.
• Various Debian-related things
• "taking OpenSSL's RAND_bytes() (which uses /dev/urandom, EGD, or a pregenerated seed file) function and stirring that into a target buffer of arbitrary length, such that use of actual high-quality entropy bits is constant (probably a read of several words each time a thread calls into (threadsafe from the start, no *_r() crap!) FAUXRAND_bytes() for the first time) has been on my plate since...well, since just now." (mail to Dr. Richard Vuduc, 2009-09-19)

Projects with their own pages

• libdank: Long-term personal collection of routines / application frameworks with a low-level feel
• TANGE: Terminal Application (Next-Generation Emulation)
• ctxdiff: Context-sensitive fractal fuzzy diffing (not at all like shingleprinting)
• xsh: Exactly what it sounds like!
• makelint, which immediately suggests? lintmake
• libtorque: Multithreaded event handler for UNIX on manycore NUMA

Core stuff

Parvenu

• One string-matching automaton to Rule them All! It must handle:
  • Thousands (millions?) of patterns concurrently
  • Initially targeting GigE wire speeds
  • UTF-8 (at a minimum) and various transcodings
  • Small-memory (embedded) environments
  • Most elements of regular expressions (definitely all the syntactic sugar)
• Uses libblaze as a memory management helper

libblaze

• Use cpuid to select and dlopen(2) a processor-specific set of low-level routines
  • Observe the details within Ulrich Drepper's fine document!
• Expose cpuid and SMP details
• Expose algorithms for memory management / layout tuned to cache/DRAM parameters (detected with SPD)
• Material largely inspired by Warren's Hacker's Delight.
  • And to a lesser, far less rigorous extent, Kaspersky's Effective Memory Usage.
• Might have already been superseded by liboil. That damn open source community moves fast!

Networking

Zetetic

• Network traffic analysis (ala Wireshark or tcpdump) with strong covert channel detection
• Passive network modeling (protocols, services, hosts, versions) initially
  • To be paired with vulnerability correlation, active probing, histories (ala SourceFire RNA?)
• Higher layers do not restrict the inductive analysis of lower layers, but influence the deduction
• Automata-based analysis of content builds up possibility space of what it CAN be
  • Probability multipliers (products of series) paired with non-deterministic automata
• Expert knowledge-based reduction of possibility space adds input as to what it OUGHT be
• Neural net-based learning with state determines what it IS
  • Over time, confidence in matching both recurring and new traffic increases
• Uses Parvenu as a pattern-matching helper

liburine

• The inverse of Zetetic. Take a leak (alternatively: "You're in")!
• Use arbitrary combinations of protocols (and fuzzing/embedding thereof) to find channels
• Goals: if even a bit of controllable information can be used as a channel
  • Tunnel openvpn(?) (and thus TOR(?)) under it
• Goals: Zetetic should be able to find us, but nothing of lesser power!
• The ultimate assistant for: whistleblowers, samizdat publishers, hax0rs stuck in airports, Iranians

drbenway

• Checks sysctls, netstat, /proc, etc for network settings. Makes extensive sensible recommendations.
  • Is device polling / NAPI in use? Do firewall rules disallow PMTU discovery?
  • Is TCP FRTO being used in the presence of wireless links? etc
• Analyzes pcaps or raw sockets in situ, with filters, performing detailed diagnostics ie
  • "TCP 1323 high-performance extensions are being used in 24% of the connections"
  • "Fragmentation is resulting from port 7000's large UDP emissions, can we tune it this way..."

Compilation/binaries

gcc stuff

• Work on RABLET
• It'd be interesting to take GIMPLE and apply it to malware analysis
• Work on finishing out ISO C99 support
• Work on Coding Rule Checking (GGCC)

debugging / reverse engineering tools

• getgetopt -- discover a program's command line parameters via object analysis
  • maybe something to test combinations of command line parameters, as well?
• getgccopt -- discover the compiler options used to build an object. difficult!
• arrlimiter -- run object code with various rlimit restrictions to test failure paths
• ploom -- pthreads debugging from process (tracing framework, object lookup + pthread knowledge, contention measures, etc)

Aborted projects (very incomplete)

• Investigate suffer and see whether it's feasible (update: fbcmd hendels its dendels Dank 23:05, 8 December 2008 (UTC))

Various past open source contributions (very incomplete)

• Wireshark: Fixed handling of IPv4 fragmentation bits
• Linux kernel: Addressed issues in HugeTLBFS's API. Addressed an issue in IPv4 address/route removal.
• strace: Addressed issues in various architectures' sendfile(2) support