Blargh

Author Archives: Blargh

20 years of maintaining an open source program

It’s been almost 10 years since my previous post about this. And 20 years since 2000-02-24, which is when arping 0.1 was released. It was a 208 line C file, with a hand made Makefile.

As of today when Arping 2.21 is overdue to be released, the code in .c and .h files (excluding tests) is 3863 lines, and it uses the amazing autotools framework for analyzing dependencies.

I’ve recently had the displeasure of working with cmake, which is just the worst. Why anyone would think cmake is even remotely acceptable I’ll never understand.

CMake sucks

But the Arping story continues. It isn’t getting many new major features. Still, since the last post there’s been 205 commits, and 10 releases.

Things like:

  • Change from gettimeofday() to clock_gettime(), when available. More info about that in this blog post.
  • Don’t check for uid=0 and stop. Capabilities can come in other ways
  • Change from poll() to select() to work around bug in MacOS X
  • Use nice and modern getifaddrs() to resolve interfaces
  • Update documentation
  • Improve error messages
  • Update author email address
  • Fix warnings and general code cleanup
  • Used coverity to find and fix suspicious code
  • Add some more stats to output
  • Continue reading

Broadband RF scanner

One great thing about software defined radio is that you can become less blind to the invisible world of radio waves that’s all around us. One simple thing is to do a survey of the spectrum, to see what parts are busy.

More practically you can also use this to find which Wifi channels are least busy, so that you can get optimal performance on your network. Counting the number of networks is not a good indicator, since one network may be completely unused, while another is used 24/7 to stream Netflix. And some networks are hidden anyway, making them no more secure, but more annoying.

[GNU Radio][gnuradio] has a bunch of building blocks for some interactive peeking at spectrums, but there’s still some assembly required in order to make actually useful things.

To do a survey I used a USRP B200 with a [broadband spiral antenna. If you’re only interested in the Wifi spectrum then a 2.4/5GHz antenna is a better choice.

You can probably use a cheaper SDR, but you need to make sure it sends frequency tag updates in GNU Radio, so the block knows which frequency is tuned, as it moves across the spectrum.

Overall Continue reading

TCP MD5

TCP_MD5 (RFC 2385) is something that doesn’t come up often. There’s a couple of reasons for that, good and bad.

I used it with tlssh, but back then (2010) it was not practical due to the limitations in the API on Linux and OpenBSD.

This is an updated post, written after I discovered TCP_MD5SIG_EXT.

What it is

In short it’s a TCP option that adds an MD5-based signature to every TCP packet. It signs the source and destination IP addresses, ports, and the payload. That way the data is both authenticated and integrity protected.

When an endpoint enables TCP MD5, all unsigned packets (including SYN packets) are silently dropped. For a signed connection it’s not even possible for an eavesdropper to reset the connection, since the RST would need to be signed.

Because it’s on a TCP level instead of part of the protocol on top of TCP, it’s the only thing that can protect a TCP connection against RST attacks.

It’s used by the BGP protocol to set a password on the connection, instead of sending the password in the handshake. If the password doesn’t match the TCP connection doesn’t even establish.

But outside of BGP it’s essentially Continue reading

Librem13v2 TPM upgrade

I have upgraded my TPM firmware on my Librem13v2. Its keys are now safe. \o/

Back in 2017 we had the Infineon disaster (aka ROCA). I’ve written about it before about how bad it is and how to check if you’re affected with a simple tool.

I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY IF YOU BRICK YOUR DEVICE OR FOR ANYTHING ELSE BAD HAPPENING FROM YOU FOLLOWING MY NOTES.

Before the upgrade

$ tpm_version | grep Chip
Chip Version:        1.2.4.40    <--- Example vulnerable version
$ cbmem -c | grep Purism         # I upgraded coreboot/SeaBIOS just before doing this.
coreboot-4.9-10-g123a4c6101-4.9-Purism-2 Wed Nov 13 19:54:43 UTC 2019 […]
[…]
Found mainboard Purism Librem 13 v2

Download upgrade tool

$ wget https://repo.pureos.net/pureos/pool/main/t/tpmfactoryupd/tpmfactoryupd_1.1.2459.0-0pureos9_amd64.deb
[…]
$ alien -t tpmfactoryupd_1.1.2459.0-0pureos9_amd64.deb
[…]
$ tar xfz tpmfactoryupd-1.1.2459.0.tgz
$ mv usr/bin/TPMFactoryUpd .
$ sudo systemctl stop trousers.service         # Need to turn off tcsd for TPMFactoryUpd to work in its default mode.
[…]
$ ./TPMFactorUpd -info
  **********************************************************************
  *    Infineon Technologies AG   TPMFactoryUpd   Ver 01.01.2459.00    *
  **********************************************************************

       TPM information:
       ----------------
       Firmware valid                    :    Yes
       TPM family                        :    1.2
       TPM firmware version               Continue reading

CVE 2019-14866: GNU cpio

I found a security bug in GNU cpio and thought I’d write down the story of that. It’s not the most interesting bug in the world, but it may still be an interesting story to some.

An odd limit

The whole thing started with me looking at the manpage

-H, --format=FORMAT
  Use given archive FORMAT. Valid formats are (the number in
  parentheses gives maximum size for individual archive member):
  bin    The obsolete binary format. (2147483647 bytes)
  odc    The old (POSIX.1) portable format. (8589934591 bytes)
  newc   The new (SVR4) portable format, which supports file
         systems having more than 65536 i-nodes. (4294967295 bytes)
  crc    The new (SVR4) portable format with a checksum added.
  tar    The old tar format. (8589934591 bytes)
  ustar  The POSIX.1 tar format. Also recognizes GNU tar archives, which are
         similar but not identical. (8589934591 bytes)
  hpbin  The obsolete binary format used by HPUX's cpio (which stores device
         files differently).
  hpodc  The portable format used by HPUX's cpio (which stores device files
         differently).

What’s wrong with this picture? Those are some very odd size limits. 2GiB and 4GiB I understand, as it’s 32bit signed and unsigned int. But tar having a max size of 8GiB? 33 bits? That Continue reading

OpenBSD in 2019

I’ve used OpenBSD on and off since 2.1. More back then than in the last 10 years or so though, so I thought I’d try it again.

What triggered this was me finding a silly bug in GNU cpio that has existed with a “FIXME” comment since at least 1994. I checked OpenBSD to see if it had a related bug, but as expected no it was just fine.

I don’t quite remember why I stopped using OpenBSD for servers, but I do remember filesystem corruption on “unexpected power disconnections” (even with softdep turned on), which I’ve never really seen on Linux.

That and that fewer things “just worked” than with Linux, which matters more when I installed more random things than I do now. I’ve become a lot more minimalist. Probably due to less spare time. Life is better when you don’t run things like PHP (not that OpenBSD doesn’t support PHP, just an example) or your own email server with various antispam tooling, and other things.

This is all experience from running OpenBSD on a server. On my next laptop I intend to try running OpenBSD on the dektop, and will see if that more ad-hoc environment Continue reading

TCP MD5

TCP_MD5 (RFC 2385) is something that doesn’t come up often. There’s a couple fo reasons for that, good and bad.

I used it with tlssh, but this should explain why I didn’t enable it by default.

What it is

In short it’s a TCP option that adds an MD5-based signature to every TCP packet. It signs the source and destination IP address, and the ports, and the payload. That way the data is both authenticated and integrity protected.

When an endpoint enables TCP MD5, all unsigned packets (including SYN packets) are silently dropped. For a signed connection it’s not even possible for an eavesdropper to reset the connection, since the RST would need to be signed.

It’s used by the BGP protocol to set a password on the connection, instead of sending the password in the handshake. If the password doesn’t match the TCP connection doesn’t even establish.

But outside of BGP it’s essentially not used, which is a shame. If we could enable it for any TCP service it’d add a preshared key and completely replace the silly port knocking. It probably couldn’t replace user passwords, but it could add a layer and greatly reduce attack surface much Continue reading

D-Star is a closed system

What is the point of amateur radio? To learn about radio, propagation, the electromagnetic spectrum in general. To understand how it works, and maybe even build or modify your own equipment. The license, after all, is the only legal way to use the electromagnetic spectrum at interesting power levels.

In order to learn we must be able to inspect; To tinker, or at the very least have access to a specification we can build from.

Some amateur radio operators seem to complain that people don’t build their own radios anymore. That they just buy a box and antenna and are now consumers. This is not what I’m talking about here. First, you know in principle how your radio works. And you could build one that could replace it. Would it be as good as a modern fancy rig? Of course not. It wouldn’t be as good, but you could build one, and you could use it just as well as the bought one.

And if you learn enough, and tweak enough with the rig and antenna system, you could build something better for your particular environment.

When I first learned that D-Star used a proprietary voice codec I couldn’t understand Continue reading

JT65 with SDR

JT65 is a slow protocol for propagation reports. In short it takes 60 seconds to send 13 characters. Then you wait 60 seconds for a reply, and repeat.

The 60 seconds are actually 1 second silence, 46.872 second of signal, then another 12.128 seconds of silence, allowing for clock drifts and for a human to choose the reply.

The mode is this slow in order to add a lot of redundancy and to make it easier for the receiver to dig out a signal way below the noise floor. It was originally meant for making contacts by bouncing signals off the moon, which has a path loss of ~250dB. Someone even managed a JT65 moonbounce on 10 Watts using JT65 with gear you and I could buy/build!. That’s the power of a low energy light bulb!

I wanted to do propagation experiments with SDR, with low power in various frequency bands, but couldn’t find a GNURadio module for JT65. So I made one.

The JT65 specification is very well written, except for the parts it says “the code is the specification”. Which would normally be fine, but the code is in Fortran and Fortran is terrible.

JT65A is Continue reading

Base Go packages

The Go standard library is generally great, but some parts have replacements that are just plain better and remove frustrations that you may have not even realised were frustrations. Here are my recommendations for every Go program.

I wouldn’t recommend that anyone use the standard library version of these for any purpose, since better alternatives exist.

This list may expand in the future.

gorilla/mux

The standard router is fine, but very low level. Here’s some of the features that makes it vital.

Filter on HTTP method

With the standard router you have to manually check that the method is what you expect it to be, and if the same endpoint has both GET and POST then you have to route that yourself. With gorilla/mux it’s as simple as:

r := mux.NewRouter()
get := r.Method("GET").Subrouter()
post := r.Method("POST").Subrouter()
get.HandleFunc("/", handleRoot)
get.HandleFunc("/items", handleListItems)
post.HandleFunc("/items", handleUploadItem)

You can also assert that headers are in place, for example to check X-Requested-With because some API endpoints should not be allowed in cross-domain XHR requests. Adding it to the router instead of manual checks simplifies code and reduces risk of forgetting to add the check.

Pattern URLs

With Continue reading

Amateur Radio and FT8

My interest in SDR got me into Amateur Radio. One reason was that so that I could transmit on non-ISM bands and with more power. Turns out the 2.3GHz band available to Amateur Radio operators is much quieter than the 2.4GHz band where WiFi, bluetooth, microwave ovens, drones, cordless phones and everything else lives. Shocker, I know.

Amateur radio doesn’t just have voice and morse code, there’s also digital modes.

A popular mode is FT8. It’s only used to exchange signal reports, so there’s no chatting. It’s in fact often practically unattended.

It’s a good way to check the quality of your radio setup, and the radio propagation properties that depend on how grumpy the ionosphere is at the moment.

If you transmit, even if you nobody replies, you’ll be able to see on PSKReporter who heard you, which is useful.

Because propagation should be pretty much symmetric, receiving a strong signal should mean that two-way communication is possible with the station. Though FT8 is a slow mode that will get through where others won’t, so a weak FT8 signal means that any voice communication is very unlikely to get through.

Unfortunately unlike WSPR the standard FT8 Continue reading

Microsoft: ReFS is ridiculous

I’ve blogged before about how the new integrity-checking filesystem in Windows, ReFS, doesn’t actually have integrity checking turned on by default. It’s pretty silly that for a modern filesystem meant to compete with ZFS and BtrFS, to have the main 21st century feature turned off by default. But it’s not quite ridiculous. Not yet.

Now it turns out that scrubbing is only supported on Windows Server

  1. Microsoft honestly shipped an integrity-checking filesystem in Windows 10 with no way to repair or scrub it.

I used to say that Windows 10 is the best Windows ever, and that Microsoft kinda won my trust back. But what the hell?

I contacted Microsoft support over chat, who first suggested I do a system restore (sigh). But after I insisted that they please confirm that it’s supposed to work confirmed that no that only ships with Windows Server.

It’s not even clear from their pricing if I need the $882 Standard Edition or the $6,155 Datacenter Edition. Either one is way too much for such a standard feature.

What the hell, Microsoft? All I want is a checksumming file system. Either provide it, or don’t. Don’t give me a checksumming filesystem that can’t be Continue reading

Why bitcoin is terrible

For every day that passes I like bitcoin less. It’s bad for the world.

I have ranted about this many times, and it’s time I consolidate these rants into a blog post.

We’ll see with time if this rant ages poorly or not.

Section 1: Practicalities

What bitcoin is trying to achieve in payments

These would be good things:

  • Anonymity
  • Peer to peer and remote payments

What bitcoin is actually good for

Bitcoin today is pretty much only good for two things:

  • Committing crimes
  • Speculating on currency

If you’re not doing one of those, then don’t use Bitcoin.

If you are an online store then sure, accept Bitcoin. There’s moral problems with supporting Bitcoin (see rest of post), but as long as you immediately convert to fiat currency when you receive payment it’s fine for you. There are even companies out there that’ll guarantee an exchange rate so that you never have to get into the business of currency.

You may say that Bitcoin can be used to get money out of China, or into Brazil, or to enable shopping of “things that should not be called ‘drugs’ anyway”, but you have to admit that no matter what you think Continue reading

WPA2 and Infineon

The recent bug in WPA2 has a worst case outcome that is the same as using a wifi without a password: People can sniff, maybe inject… it’s not great but you connect to open wifi at Starbucks anyway, and you’re fine with that because you visit sites with HTTPS and SSH. Eventually your client will get a fix too, so the whole thing is pretty “meh”.

But there’s a reason I call it “WPA2 bug” and I call the recent issue with Infineon key generation “the Infineon disaster”. It’s much bigger. It seems like the whole of Estonia needs to re-issue ID cards, and several years worth of PC-, smartcard-, Yubikey, and other production have been generating bad keys. And these keys will stick around.

From now until forever when you generate, use, or accept RSA keys you have to check for these weak keys. I assume OpenSSH will if it hasn’t already.

But then what? It’s not like servers can just reject these keys, or it’ll lock people out. And it’s not clear that an adversary even has your public key for SSH. And you can’t crack the key if you don’t have the public half. Maybe a Continue reading

Internet in China

In this post I’ll describe some experiences I had with the Internet in China, and what it means for people making websites in the west in order to reach expats, visitors, and anyone else in China. So this should be useful information even if you don’t care about China as a market at all.

This blog post may be updated, as I have more thoughts on Internet in China.

My subjective experience is that “Internet in China” is an oxymoron. How exactly is there “Internet” without Google, Facebook, and Twitter? When attaching an Android phone to a WiFi in China it even says “Wi-Fi has no Internet access”.

OK, that’s not entirely serious. Especially since I’m obviously not aware of what the Chinese language Internet looks like, not speaking or reading Chinese. Baidu looks like it largely provides the services Google does (search, maps, …), but they’re pretty much not translated. The Baidu Map app seems fine, but is almost useless if you don’t speak Chinese. The one thing it’s good for is that unlike Google Maps (if you can even get to it. see below) it actually shows you a correct location within China.

But more importantly it’s not Continue reading

Is my TPM affected by the Infineon disaster?

I made a tool to check if your TPM chip is bad. Well, it extracts the SRK public key and you can then use marcan’s tool to easily check if the key is good or bad.

Example use:

$ g++ -o check-srk -std=gnu++11 check-srk.cc -ltspi -lssl -lcrypto 2>&1 && ./check-srk
Size: 2048
Outputting modulus…
8490234823904890234823904823904890238490238490238490238490[…]893428490823904231
$ wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/marcan/fc87aa78085c2b6f979aefc73fdc381f/raw/526bc2f2249a2e3f5d4450c7c412e0dbf57b2288/roca_test.py
[…]
$ python roca_test.py 8490234823904890234823904823904890238490238490238490238490[…]893428490823904231
Vuln!

(use -s if you have an SRK PIN)

If the SRK is weak then not only are very likely anything else you generated in the TPM weak, but also anything generated outside the TPM and imported is crackable, since your blobs are encrypted using this crackable SRK key.

Yubikey for SSH after the Infineon disaster

Because of the Infineon Disaster of 2017 lots of TPM and Yubikey keys have to be regenerated.

I have previously blogged about how to create these keys inside the yubikey, so here’s just the short version of how to redo it by generating the key in software and importing it into the yubikey.

When it appears to stall, that’s when it’s waiting for a touch.

openssl genrsa -out key.pem 2048
openssl rsa -in key.pem -outform PEM -pubout -out public.pem
yubico-piv-tool -s 9a -a import-key  --touch-policy=always -i key.pem
yubico-piv-tool -a verify-pin -a selfsign-certificate -s 9a -S '/CN=my SSH key/' -i public.pem -o cert.pem
yubico-piv-tool -a import-certificate -s 9a -i cert.pem
rm key.pem public.pem cert.pem
ssh-keygen -D /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/opensc-pkcs11.so -e

Delete all mentions of previous key. It’s good to have a disaster plan ahead of time if keys need to be replaced, but if you don’t have one:

  1. Inventory all bad keys. Make sure you have their fingerprints.
  2. Inventory all places this key could be installed.
  3. Generate new keys.
  4. Distribute new keys. (in this case, add to all relevant ~/.ssh/authorized_keys)
  5. Remove all old keys.
  6. Grep for the keys found in Continue reading

Yubikey for SSH after the Infineon disaster

Because of the Infineon Disaster of 2017 lots of TPM and Yubikey keys have to be regenerated.

I have previously blogged about how to create these keys inside the yubikey, so here’s just the short version of how to redo it by generating the key in software and importing it into the yubikey.

When it appears to stall, that’s when it’s waiting for a touch.

openssl genrsa -out key.pem 2048
openssl rsa -in key.pem -outform PEM -pubout -out public.pem
yubico-piv-tool -s 9a -a import-key  --touch-policy=always -i key.pem
yubico-piv-tool -a verify-pin -a selfsign-certificate -s 9a -S '/CN=my SSH key/' -i public.pem -o cert.pem
yubico-piv-tool -a import-certificate -s 9a -i cert.pem
rm key.pem public.pem cert.pem
ssh-keygen -D /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/opensc-pkcs11.so -e

Delete all mentions of previous key. It’s good to have a disaster plan ahead of time if keys need to be replaced, but if you don’t have one:

  1. Inventory all bad keys. Make sure you have their fingerprints.
  2. Inventory all places this key could be installed.
  3. Generate new keys.
  4. Distribute new keys. (in this case, add to all relevant ~/.ssh/authorized_keys)
  5. Remove all old keys.
  6. Grep for the keys found in Continue reading
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