Posts

Firewall Knock Operator (fwknop) about to rock even more....

Dec 13, 2008
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Just catching up on some of my blog-reading and saw that Mike Rash announced release 1.9.9 of fwknop, the Firewall Knock Operator. He says the next release will have support for pf and the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud. Both of those are really exciting. pf is OpenBSD's firewall, while Amazon's EC2 is...well...mainstream, individual-affordable cloud computing.

I'm a huge fan of fwknop. It was the first scalable, mature implementation of a port-knocking style idea. With that said, fwknop does something so much stronger than port-knocking: single packet authorization. Using PGP/GPG keys makes this scalable and far more secure than a fixed password or sequence of ports. Finally, it achieves the real goal of port-knocking: to reduce the complexity and LoC count of the code that is directly exposed to the entire Internet. I'm very excited to hear about pf support. Bravo, Mike!

Mike and I go way back. We met in grad school, both studying Mathematics, and he was one of the first contributors to Bastille Linux / Bastille UNIX. He's written a number of great tools, which deserve even more fame than they've gotten already. fwknop is my favorite, but I'm also a big fan of gpgdir and fwsnort.

Kindle / E-book Reader Tools for Mac OS X

Oct 14, 2008
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I've been really enjoying the Amazon Kindle. It's a great device, though not as svelte as the Sony model. The real key is the Amazon Store, which has an enormous number of books at prices generally under 60% of retail. Basically, they're a bit lower than the Amazon price for the real book. When you couple that with the totally free ability to find and download a book in under a minute from that store via the Kindle's built-in EVDO/cellphone modem, it's a great way to buy books in a hurry.

I also put my own Word docs, PDF's and so on onto the Kindle. Here are tools that format those for the screen and put them in the MOBI/PRC standard format. While the Amazon people call their format something else, it's really just MOBI/PRC, which is the same thing I read books on my Palm Pilot on in 1998.

Tubby - a CHM file converter

Stanza - an awesome book converter for tons of devices, including iPhone

MobileRead's wiki page on Ebook conversion

iPhone Hacking Links

Oct 14, 2008
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I really love the iPhone, most of all because it's one of the most portable, useful pocket-computers for which you can develop programs.

Here are a couple quick links that you might find useful.

Developers - Port Your Apps and Get them Hosted for 2.0+

ModMyI.com's howto: Jailbreak your iPhone

GoogleCode hosts MobileTerminal

iPhone 3G Jailbreaking

Aug 20, 2008
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It took way too long to get finalized, but you can finally jailbreak the 3G iPhone reliably. There's a great Howto on the LifeHacker site:

LifeHacker: Jailbreak iPhone 2.0 with Pwnage Tool

While my favorite Jailbreak application is ZiPhone, which makes this very easy, single-step, and very reversible, ZiPhone doesn't jailbreak the 2.0 firmware yet. The iPhone Dev Team finally got this stable.

By the way, LifeHacker is an excellent site that brings the geek/hacker mentality to far more problems than normal. There are constantly great articles there describing clever ways to do things better or with less effort/time. They range from

A Computer Security blog - first post

Aug 20, 2008
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I've been meaning to start a computer security blog for a long time, but kept holding out, hoping that I could convince the other Founders at Intelguardians that we should start one for the company. I've enjoyed reading plenty of other companies' blogs in this field.

I just got back from Black Hat 2008 and Def Con 16, which were both quite awesome. There were great talks at each and great socializing/networking/hanging out and talking computer security. I gave a pair of talks at Def Con and participated on the "Internet Wars 2008" panel with Dan Kaminsky and Marc Sachs. The talk descriptions are linked to these titles: Owning the Users with The Middler and They're Hacking Our Clients! Introducing Free Client-side Intrusion Prevention. I'll make a post about each one, along with download links, real soon now.