This week I got the CREA certification to add to my list of CISSP, CEPT, Visa QSA. This certification required a good practical and conceptual knowledge of reverse engineering. The certification requires a good working knowledge of components such as IA-32 assembly language, malware reversing, expert level knowledge of IDA Pro, OllyDbg, HiEW, Dumpbin etc., PE File header, repairing packed and compacted binaries, using system level reversing etc. The exam was good and tested on the concepts of the reverse engineer.

I will be speaking in Prof. Sengupta’s class at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York on Oct 28, 2010.  The topic of discussion will where does Digital Forensics fit in the big picture of organizations.  The talk will introduce the students to a variety of topics including choosing a career as a digital forensics investigator, their duties as an investigator, being successful as an investigator, case studies and real-life problems faced by the computer forensic investigators.

I recently purchased a Proxmark3 from GeZhi Electronics. The proxmark3 client wouldn’t work. In fact the `dmesg` output did not even show the /dev/ttyACM0 device as was said all across the forum. i tried flashing the firmware but kept getting this error:

~/proxmark3/client# ./flasher -b ../bootrom/obj/bootrom.elf 
Loading ELF file '../bootrom/obj/bootrom.elf'...
Loading usable ELF segments:
0: V 0x00100000 P 0x00100000 (0x00000200->0x00000200) [R X] @0x94
1: V 0x00200000 P 0x00100200 (0x00000b38->0x00000b38) [RWX] @0x298
Attempted to write bootloader but bootloader writes are not enabled
Error while loading ../bootrom/obj/bootrom.elf

Also this is what showed up in the dmesg:

[ 7953.991935] usb 2-1.4: new full-speed USB device number 40 using ehci_hcd
[ 7959.078302] usb 2-1.4: New USB device found, idVendor=9ac4, idProduct=4b8f
[ 7959.078314] usb 2-1.4: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 7959.078321] usb 2-1.4: Product: ProxMark-3 RFID Instrument
[ 7959.078326] usb 2-1.4: Manufacturer: J. Westhues
[ 7959.078331] usb 2-1.4: SerialNumber: ChangeMe
[ 7959.080485] hid-generic 0003:9AC4:4B8F.0014: hiddev0,hidraw0: USB HID v1.00 Device [J. Westhues ProxMark-3 RFID Instrument] on usb-0000:00:1d.0-1.4/input0

Note that in the above the device doesn’t show up as a /dev/ttyACM0 device which is what we need for the proxmark3 client application to work.
So it seemed like there was an issue with the Proxmark3 not being recognized as a CDC device. So I went through the googlecode repository and went to a version of firmware where CDC was not being used. It also seemed that the flasher was the issue. So I used an old flasher to flash with the latest firmware and boom it worked! Remember to keep the button on the Proxmark3 pressed when you plug it in, and keep holding it down until the firmware update has finished.
Here are the commands:

# svn checkout http://proxmark3.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ proxmark3
# export DEVKITPRO=$HOME/proxmark3/
# export DEVKITARM=$DEVKITPRO/devkitARM
# export PATH=${PATH}:${DEVKITARM}/bin
# cd proxmark3
# make all
# cd ..
# svn checkout -r 629 http://proxmark3.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ ~/proxmark3-old-3
# cd proxmark3-old-3/
# make all
# cd client
# ./flasher -b ../../proxmark3/bootrom/obj/bootrom.elf ../../proxmark3/armsrc/obj/osimage.elf ../../proxmark3/armsrc/obj/fpgaimage.elf

And boom! There you … all flashed and now the device is recognized as a /dev/ttyACM0 device.

If you are a South Indian, have a long name, use lotus notes and want to send encrypted e-mail using Internet Certificates…you may just be out of luck! Why?
Lotus Notes 6 does not support importing of PKCS#12 (.pfx) certificates which have the CN (Customer name), OU (Organization unit), O (Organization), CA (Certificatio Authority) fields together more than 255 characters. Many of my south Indian friends in fact have names that are 40 characters themselves! Alongwith the O, OU and the CA taken together this could easily exceed more than 255 characters. On encountering such a situation, Lotus Notes also gives a friendly error message which my friends may not find quite amusing at that point “Name too long”. Once you encounter this error, you cannot proceed with the import. To work around this see if you can reduce the characters in OU and O fields because your e-mail ID has to match the one in Lotus.
I also found a useless response from IBM to get rid of this problem. Their response was pretty much “learn to deal with it! we won’t correct our stupid software”.
Justin’s written a pretty useful how to on importing S/MIME certificates into Lotus notes.

In metasploit there’s a plugin admin/backupexec/dump. This plugin uses the default credentials to login to Veritas backupexec agent and download an arbitrary file. The catch is it downloads it in the MTF (Microsoft Tape Format) file. You need a utility called NTBackup to restore this file. Metasploit authors have conveniently made this available for us at http://metasploit.com/tools/msbksrc.tar.gz.
However, if you compile this file you get an error:
msqic.c:814: error: conflicting types for ‘bques’
This happens because the function prototype is missing.
Goto line 169 of msqic.c file in the source code and add the following line:
int bques(char);
Once you add this, you should be able to make the client and should be able to extract the file from the .mtf file.

It can get interesting to test the security of thick client applications. If you start debugging you could end up losing a lot of time with not too many results. Of course, time is always at a premium when you pen testing in a week long gig. There are a couple of tools that can really help you to gain insight into a thick client (i.e., an application written in a binary format such as an executable, ActiveX control, flash object, etc.) and communicating to a server using the client/server model.
The need for a proxy to hook into the communications is a prime need and EchoMirage can do a great job of hooking into function calls related to win32 sockets, openssl functions. You have to select an active process for Echomirage to inject into or you can even spawn a process from the menu options in EchoMirage itself. It’s a great tool with a built-in editor so you can edit the traffic. However, sometimes you have to be careful because it’s binary data that you are editing so while editing it is easy to mess up a few flags, etc.
Another great tool is actually a plugin for OllyDbg called UHooker that can let you specify which functions you want to place a hook into. You have to configure a binary editor of your choosing and the functions to be hooked into in a .cfg file. The documentation for Uhooker is located here.

I was getting CUPSD errors when trying to use my Laser Brother HL 2040 printer. But, you can install Brother HL-2040 by going to the brother website and downloading the linux drivers located here:
http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public_s/id/linux/en/download_prn.html#HL-2040
I just installed the lpd driver using the command as follows:
$ sudo dpkg -i brhl2070nlpr-2.0.1-1.i386.deb
When printing now, just select local lpd and then select brother-HL2070 printer from the list (the drivers for both versions are same).