Yesterday, while searching for Web Services on the Internet I came across an old, popular web service called “Amazon’s mechanical turk” based on the mechanical turk trick from old magic days.
The gist is, you (“The requestor”) put in a HIT (Human Interaction Task) in amazon’s lingo so that some one on the Internet can solve it for you (“the worker”). Most of what I saw on the website seemed like random tasks being used by researchers, online yellowpages-like directories, marketing, classification of goods, etc.
What might also be an interesting application, and I’m sure it’s probably being used for is, captcha-solving for spammers.
Also, the Amazon Mechanical Turk terms of service don’t help and say the following (verbatim):
Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a venue for third-party Requesters and third-party Providers to enter into and complete transactions. Amazon Mechanical Turk and its Affiliates are not involved in the transactions between Requesters and Providers. As a result, we have no control over the quality, safety or legality of the Services, the ability of Providers to provide the Services to Requesters’ satisfaction, or the ability of Requesters to pay for Services. We are not responsible for the actions of any Requester or Provider. We do not conduct any screening or other verification with respect to Requesters or Providers, nor do we provide any recommendations. As a Requester or a Provider, you use the Site at your own risk.

Given this, and the rates prevalent (about a penny or so per task), I think spammers might have a free-run on this service. Of course, amazon has a conveniently available web service available at http://mechanicalturk.amazonaws.com/AWSMechanicalTurk/AWSMechanicalTurkRequester.wsdl.
Now, the key question is, suppose a spammer uses this service, who’s to blame…I wouldn’t imagine the solvers know what the intent of the act is, amazon (possibly) can’t be liable because the ToS is required to be accepted before use, and since the requestor is somewhere on the Internet, he/she possibly can’t be traced.
Of course, I’m not saying that Mechanical Turk is all bad, but like all walks of life there’s a positive or a negative use to everything.
As someone once said: “Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right”!

Come end of semester and the project deadlines start impending! The situation I am in is one of great thrill and rush! For the CS558L I’m doing this project in which I have to implement an automated worm fingerprinting mechanism but not only that combining it with ITrace I want to make Worm attacks and DDoS attacks a thing of past!
The scheme in plain English is to detect automatically if your network is being attacked by looking at the traffic and if so communicate this information to whoever you are forwarding this packet to! The ICMP messages that will be forwarded will carry information about who sent this traffic and other such information (including the signature of attack traffic). The receiver with all this information could gather the source of attacks. If all the routers followed this scheme then we will be able to reconstruct the entire path of the attack so the entry point of the attack could also be sealed….(hopefully leading to a Worm and DDoS attack-free internet)!!!
Really hopeful…aren’t I??? 😉
But again this technique has the same single flaw as the other techniques in that it needs co-operation between ISPs.
I am currently coding this scheme in the Linux Kernel 2.6.11.7 and this is my first tryst with linux kernel programming…let’s see what future holds for me!

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.

Yesterday the whole day was spent in trying to go through the Nutch source code. Chris and Ashish helped me out alongwith this link
Dissecting the Nutch Crawler. This showed me that :
The file Fetcher.java has a reference to the “content” variable (which is of type Content). I found that initially only the URLs are stored during the crawl, then a request is sent. Then based on the MIME type of the content returned, the ParserFactory class creates a parser (html parser, pdf parser etc.). The code for these parsers can be found at nutch-0.6/src/plugin/. These plugins do the parsing and get the content as a “Parse” object. Using the Parse.getText() method (which we also felt was interesting) we can get the text content of any page!!!!!

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

I recently came back from the ToorConX in San Diego, CA. It was a great conference with some really cool talks. Especially RFD (Remote file download using blind sql injection), reversing malware using browser hooking, cracking crypt() hashes using Ps3, grey box peach fuzz xml generation tool (nunchaku), voip eavesdropping, bypassing browser memory protection.
These were some really cool talks but I still don’t have access to any presentation slides yet for the con. May be those will be posted some time.

If you are installing Windows Driver Kit (WDK) from Microsoft and you choose to install the Device Simulation Framework (DSF) for USB and such devices, then you need to have the DCOM Server Process Launcher service running otherwise you get errors as cryptic as:
Unexpected Installation Error. Error in installing.
I wish there was more information that could be given in the error. Since I figured this out with only trial and error, I thought I’ll post the solution to this error.