Last night I was trying to get a VeriSign issued SSL certificate installed on my ASA using Cisco ASDM 6.2. I installed the Intermediate CA and the CA certificates all installed. I then imported the SSL certificate into the “Configuration -> Device Management -> Manage Certificates -> Identity Certificates” but it did not seem to work. I kept getting an error “Failed to parse or verify imported certificate”. The certificate was in the .p7b form. Changing the format of the certificate to X.509 resulted in acceptance of the certificate.
I sincerely hope that Cisco alters its error messages to accurately reflect that .p7b is not a format supported by them.

Web services security has been very much talked about in the recent times. Especially, with the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) gaining increasing importance. One of the interesting ways to protect these web services encapsulated in SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is using digital client-side authentication certificates. Programmers typically use Java Key Store (.JKS) files to establish connectivity to these applications. However, if we want to create a custom client using some scripting it creates an issue as we tend to use languages such as perl, bash, etc. to create connectivity. So I ran into this excellent tool called KeyTool IUI. This tool helps you import the Java Key Store (Tools -> Keystore Manager -> JKS Keystore) and export it in the PKCS#12, X.509 PEM, and DER formats. You can further use OpenSSL to change the formats as you please or separate out the components of the certificates.
You could even take these certificates in X.509 or PFX formats and convert into JCEKS, JKS formats! Pretty cool huh? Nice software!

What www.hak5.org started was quite commendable and I’m really not sure what the status of the Community Rainbow Tables project is at hak5.
They are generating the rainbow tables with the following configuration:

* NTLM* mixalpha-numeric-all-space* [abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789!@#$%^&*()-_+=~`[]{}|\:;"'<>,.?/ ]* 26 indexes, 22 files/index* 572 tables total* 340.93GB* 96.07% probability of successful crack

I’m currently generating index 13 and index 26 on this configuration. It would be cool to have multiple people generate it and upload it. I know many people are already doing that as we speak. We should also have SHA1, MD5 project for mixalpha-numberic-all-space configurations.

I’ve been struggling to find the best working version of John so that it can crack MS Cache outputs from Cachedump (of course, this functionality is now included in fgdump). Running fgdump gives two files host.pwdump and hostname.cachedump. I’ve found 127.0.0.1.pwdump and 127.0.0.1.cachedump files upon using fgdump without any parameters.
So now you have the Cached credentials but then comes the big problem of cracking those. So there’s the jumbo patch for john-1.7.2.
Following commands need to be executed to get this patch going:

Go ahead and get cracking:
$ cd run/
$ ./john –format=mscash

The problem: Using Digital Certificates issued by a Certification Authority (CA) with curl.

The situation: I have a .cer (Digital Certificate) file, .pfx (Personal Information Exchange file i.e., the private key for the certificate). I cannot use either of these to authenticate to the web service as curl would not accept these formats.

The solution:
1) Convert it into PEM format (X.509 certificate) using openssl.
openssl pkcs12 -in abcd.pfx -out abcd.pem
Enter a passphrase and a password.
2) Still you cannot use this with curl because you’d get a few errors.
3) Convert this PEM certificate into three different certificates for the client, the private key and the certification authority certificate.
openssl pkcs12 -in abcd.pfx -out ca.pem -cacerts -nokeys
openssl pkcs12 -in abcd.pfx -out client.pem -clcerts -nokeys
openssl pkcs12 -in abcd.pfx -out key.pem -nocerts
4) Use the following command:
curl -k https://www.thesitetoauthenticate.com/test -v –key key.pem –cacert ca.pem –cert client.pem:

This stuff is also mentioned on curl forum at http://curl.haxx.se/mail/archive-2005-09/0138.html