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Here's a short summary of the less boring technical things I've done so far.
I consider this my personal home page and feel like writing my boring history
on this page. If you fall asleep, you've been warned. :P Far from all of
this is professional security work, some of it was done for fun and education.
I started out in C with maintaining and contributing a bit to the development
of eggdrop, the all-purpose IRC bot. My
old Tcl script for eggdrop is entity, which is
still available, now for 1.6 eggdrop bots. :) It's designed specially for
large distributed eggdrop networks and has very efficient channel- and basic
intrusion protection. Some people use and like it for its ease of use.
This was my first experiences with programming distributed networks, sort of.
The first C code I ever published was targa, which was a combination of
existing DoS proof-of-concept attacks, much of it cut and paste. My latest DoS
in that direction was targa3, which generates semi-random packets designed
to bring down IP stacks. I've used and written tools like targa3, and
attacks against the Solaris kernel and some versions of syslog and others
professionally during my time at 2XS to test various products and firewalls.
Some open-source security tools I wrote, most of them simple implementations,
include spidernet, a distributed host-based
intrusion detection system (such as tripwire), with a client/server
infrastructure, Q, a cryptography-using remote access
server over esoteric protocols, somewhat of an alternative to SSH, and
some distributed sniffers, phantom sniffer and e4d. Later on, I've written
LibMix, an archive of network, cryptography and other functions, mostly
to re-use code that I commonly need in my projects. One of my favorite
projects is NSAT (the Network Security Analysis Tool), a network scanner
that can identify most common IP-based internet services and their versions.
Unlike vulnerability scanner or penetration tools, NSAT does entirely passive
information gathering, as it leaves interpretation of the gathered version
information up to the user, which also makes less updates necessary. (By the
way: if you ever have problems with getting all the results with NSAT, just
try tuning up the timeouts in the config file. It's a feature, not a bug...).
Some of the security whitepapers I've written
so far include Protecting against the unknown,
a buffer overflow howto,
Paranoia vs. Transparency, and Automation
Potentials for IT security. Also, some c't articles (a german computer
magazine) about the Linux firewall and detecting backdoors on UNIX, but
they are not publicly available online.
So far, I've worked for 2XS Security in Israel, doing vulnerability management,
quality assurance, penetration testing, and development of SASS (StandAlone
Security System, an uber-IDS). During the R&D, we did some short-term work for
small israeli businesses and big institutions including banks, and ISPs, and
assisting the FBI with tackling anti-american/anti-israeli defacers from
Pakistan. We still retain a letter of honor from them. Oh well. Personally,
I also assisted in Project SODA, a cooperative
project with a few israeli white-hats, in which we notified the whole range
of Israeli Internet sites of their security problems. The goal was to mitigate
the effects of an early escalation of the new uprising in cyberspace. We also
advised ISPs in Israel about Anti-DDoS measures, who, at that time (around
November 2000) experienced some large-scale distributed DoS attacks. As of
mid-2002 2XS Security is not an active company. Because of the political
situation in Israel, many employees got drafted. Also, the CTO and founder,
Ehud Tenenbaum (aka. Analyzer, the media-labeled "Pentagon Hacker"),
has been jailed after four years of ongoing trials. For more information,
please see this site that his friends have put up: freeanalyzer.org.
One project I've been involved in, is vantronix,
they offer wireless security services, and have an interesting project about providing wireless internet access in metropolitan areas.
Since 2000, I work with the Hacktivismo group, a cDc-sponsored "non-profit
research and development group", as I prefer to describe it. Hacktivismo
focuses on freedom of information, human rights, and general freedom issues,
internationally, around the globe. We try to investigate violations of
those freedoms and rights and, as the cypherpunks, try to improve things
primarily by technology rather than policy, and prefer the laws of mathematics
to the laws of traditional political diplomacy to challenge the governments
and supporters exercising totalitarian rule or censorship in their countries.
Our first project was originally Peek-A-Booty, the anonymous browsing protocol,
which people like Bronc Buster and me helped designing. It later became a
private project of one of our ex-members, and is no longer associated with
us. I have no overview about this project's development status anymore, but
am focusing on current Hacktivismo projects, such as Camera/Shy and The Six/Four System, a successor of Hacktivismo concepts designed for privacy,
stealth and anonymous, free access to information, while circumventing
censorship. I was the main author to implement Six/Four peer-to-peer protocol,
and am happy about anyone getting involved and taking it apart, writing
applications for it, or improving it.
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