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Hackery

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Revision as of 18:19, 19 September 2009 by Dank (talk | contribs)

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
  • 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
  • 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.
  • Might have already been superseded by liboil.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

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))