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Hackery
From dankwiki
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
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- Might have already been superseded by liboil.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
- 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)
