Into.the.Void.

I finally had the chance to present something at the Thessaloniki Tech Talk Sessions also known as 0x375. The people over there have done a great job, and I truly mean that, bringing tech people together. Almost once a month 2 speakers can present a tech topic they like at an open auditorium inside the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. On those events people from Thessaloniki, but also from nearby cities, gather and have a great time, not only during the presentations but afterwards as well. I won’t spoil the events that take place during the tech talks, because you should definitely go if you are curious, but I can tell you that it’s not uncommon for as many as 15 to 20 people to go for beers after the talks!

So, the past Friday (25/11/2011), me and @apoikos traveled from Athens to Thessaloniki to present at 0x375. My presentation was about some security concepts on IPv6 networks, how old attacks of the IPv4 world transform to new ones on the IPv6 world and about some new ones that will appear on local networks sooner or later. I also had prepared some small live demos, but as always it’s very hard to succeed in a live demo if you don’t quite control the environment. At least some of the stuff I wanted to show were successful, and I’m happy with those. (Thanks to Nuclear for booting his OS X guinea pig)

Some apologies…When giving a presentation on IPv6, in an event that has no other introductory IPv6 presentations, I always face the same problem, most people are not very well aware of how different this protocol is from IPv4. When I ask the audience how well do they know IPv6, most people are embarrassed to say they have never actually used it, so the audience stays very, VERY silent. This means that I have to put around 15-20 slides to make a “quick introduction to IPv6”, and this unfortunately takes usually over 30′ of presentation time. Some techy/advanced people might be bored with this, but there’s no other way to overcome this “issue”. If you go straight to the point and start discussing about ND ICMPv6 messages most people won’t be able to keep up…so I’m sorry if I made some of the audience get bored by my first slides. I promise that my next talk on 0x375, cause there will surely be a next one, will be less boring for you 🙂

Thank you all for coming there, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!

You can find the slides and my live demo notes here:
0x375 – 0x07 – kargig – Security Considerations for a brave new (IPv6) World (pdf)
0x375 – 0x07 – kargig – Security Considerations for a brave new (IPv6) World – live demo notes (txt)

P.S. I’ve started collecting some interesting (for me) presentations regarding IPv6 topics at void.gr/kargig/ipv6/. Check them out if you like.

Filed by kargig at 21:06 under Greek,Internet,IPv6,Linux,Networking
Tags: 0x375, ipv6, Linux, Networking, presentation, security, Thessaloniki
No Comments | 6,646 views

It’s time!

Tomorrow is the World IPv6 Day and in order to celebrate it in Athens, we are having an IPv6 Party at hackerspace.gr!
I’ll do a small introductory presentation about the basics of IPv6 Protocol and how’s Linux doing with it. After the presentation there will be an open discussion regarding IPv6 … drinking beer.

Everyone’s invited! Be there!

Filed by kargig at 20:37 under Greek,Internet,IPv6,Linux,Networking
Tags: athens, hackerspace, hackerspace.gr, ipv6, IPv6 world day, party, presentation
No Comments | 6,977 views

Today the Hellenic IPv6 Task force organized a training day for end users. Most of the presentations were entry level, since they were targeting end users, but most of them were very interesting. I was happily surprised by Cosmote‘s presentation on their mobile IPv6 tests using native IPv6 and NAT64.

My presentation was about what is architecturally different inside an IPv6-enabled CPE. I tried to present topics like WAN addressing, LAN addressing, auto-configuration (SLAAC), DHCPv6 as well as some migration/tunneling techniques. There were lots of comments, a lot of interesting questions and I was happy to “provoke” an interesting exchange of ideas/perceptions on IPv4 NAT mainly due to the previous to last slide of my presentation 🙂

At the end of the event there was a draw and people got 4 IPv6-enabled CPEs produced by the company I work for (Gennet), 4 DSL accounts by OTE ready to use for OTE’s pilot IPv6 program and 5 IPv6 related books generously provided by Cisco.

My presentation: Defining an IPv6-ready CPE
All presentations: IPv6 End Users Training Day (2011)

On Friday(s) 27/05 and 03/06 I’ll be giving two more IPv6 presentations at University of Pireus: [oss-unipi] Event #26: Introduction to TCP/IP and IPv6. The first one will be introductory and the second one will be more technical and maybe workshop based. In the same day(s) there will also be in-depth technical IPv4 presentations by Apollon Oikonomopoulos. Be there if you like technical presentations!

Filed by kargig at 19:07 under Internet,IPv6,Linux,Networking
Tags: autoconfiguration, CPE, DHCPv6, Greek, ipv6, presentation, slaac, Taskforce, training
No Comments | 6,996 views

Intro
As said in my previous post about Fosscomm 2011, during the conference there was a wargame consisting of 5 challenges. We played in a team consisting mainly of the following members: manji/manjiki, trelo_mpifteki, mickflemm and me. Along with us was maisk mainly acting as our manager (!!) shouting at us when we did something he did not like. He was of course a great help (sometimes :P).

Few words about the team
As most people who regularly read this blog already know, I consider myself a sysadmin even though I currently work at a company that produces Linux based xDSL routers where I do most of the things required about networking and system interaction like QoS, VoIP, IPv6, firewall, etc. My coding is confined among the realms of scripting languages. Manji is also a sysadmin who has lately started to mess with VoIP. Trelo_mpifteki is mostly a java developer and so is maisk. mickflemm is a coder and a very good one, frequently messing with Linux kernel’s wireless driver support. Obviously, we are certainly not the typical wargame players…

The challenges
Be sure to download the challenges from: http://patras.fosscomm.gr/fosswar/

As soon as the wargame was on we split the challenges among us. Since mickflemm was the only coder he started to mess with challenge number 5 (reverse engineering). Me and trelo_mpifteki started to look at challenge number 1 (networking) while manji started poking at challenge number 3 (networking).

Challenge 1:
Type: Networking
Players: kargig, trelo_mpifteki
The first challenge said just this:

Connect to the elite port and find the secret message.

Everyone knows that elite = 31337
So we just did a nc X.Y.Z.W 31337 (where X.Y.Z.W is the IP address of the server) and the following message appeared:

IP protocol = 1
Timestamp
id = 1337
seq = 0xCAFE
orig = 0xDEAD

As it is easily understood one must create a packet, the problem is what kind of packet. And then was when I did a huge mistake stalling my team for more than 10 mins by insisting that Protocol 1 is IP. So we started trying to create an IP packet using scapy. Obviously we hit lots of problems because IP’s header clearly misses most of the above options, especially timestamp. Our next idea was to create a TCP packet in order to embed some of the options. This also lead to a dead end. The I looked again at my /etc/protocols file and I saw that Protocol 1 is ICMP. Timestamp is type 13, code 0 and the rest are just options. So our solution was this:

>>> packet_2= IP(dst='X.Y.Z.W')/ICMP(type=13, id=1337, seq=0xcafe, ts_ori=0xdead)
>>> send(packet_2)

Using Wireshark we captured the response packet which looked like this (this setup is on my box atm):

One can see the message: feedadeadface in it.

Hint:
If you need to compile listenicmp.c yourself you have to do something like this:

 # aptitude install libpcap-dev
# gcc -o listenicmp listenicmp.c -lpcap

Challenge 2:
Type: Steganography
Players: kargig,trelo_mpifteki,maisk
For this challenge the organizers gave us a hint what we needed to find was close to the end of the image.jpg and after “BAADF00D”.

# hd image.jpg | tail -n 4
000152a0  d4 4d 77 22 b9 9a 68 ba  ad f0 0d 78 9c 0b c9 c8  |.Mw"..h....x....|
000152b0  2c 56 00 a2 44 85 e2 d4  e4 a2 d4 12 85 dc d4 e2  |,V..D...........|
000152c0  e2 c4 f4 54 3d 00 72 da  08 ef                    |...T=.r...|
000152ca

so we found “ba ad f0 0d” and the next characters were “78 9c”. We googled those and came up with the result that it was the magic of zlib compression. So what we had to do was get the rest of the file after “ba ad f0 0d” and then uncompress that. To get the rest of the file we found the size of the file and subtracted the bytes (31) that were of interest to us:

# du -b image.jpg
86730  image.jpg
# split -b 86699 image.jpg koko
# mv kokoab final

Then we run python to decompress “final” file.

>>> import zlib
>>> ourfile=file('final')
>>> ourfile
<open file 'final', mode 'r' at 0xb7473020>
>>> chunk=ourfile.read()
>>> chunk
'x\x9c\x0b\xc9\xc8,V\x00\xa2D\x85\xe2\xd4\xe4\xa2\xd4\x12\x85\xdc\xd4\xe2\xe2\xc4\xf4T=\x00r\xda\x08\xef'
>>> zlib.decompress(chunk)
'This is a secret message.'

Challenge 3:
Type: Networking
Players: manji,maisk,kargig

While me and trelo_mpifteki were trying to solve challenges 1 and 2, manji was looking into challenge 3 pcap file for weird things. Once again we were given a hint that we needed to look at strange headers. Finding strange headers in a 800+ kb pcap file is not an easy task though. At a point manji was looking for very big sequence numbers…and then we got another hint, that we shouldn’t look at those big numbers at all. When me and trelo_mpifteki finished the other two challenges we started looking at Wireshark.
We applied the following filter:
(ip.host == 64.22.109.100) && ((tcp.seq == 0) || (tcp.seq ==1))
And the we had the following results in front of us:

Since we knew that the message was sent to “64.22.109.100” we needed to look at packets originating from “192.168.1.3”. The first thing I noticed were packets with strange TTLs, they were going up and down..so I made a guess that the secret message could be hidden there. Transforming those TTL values to ASCII was a dead end. Then we started to look closer at every packet that 192.168.1.3 sent to 64.22.109.100 and we grouped them by destination port. There was clearly something going on with destination port 58900. A careful eye will also notice that packets towards port 58900 don’t have an MSS set while others mostly do. So, we expanded our filter with packets that also had destination port 58900:
((ip.host == 64.22.109.100) && ((tcp.seq == 0) || (tcp.seq ==1))) && (tcp.dstport == 58900)
and came up with this:

If you look closely at the selected packet from Wireshark, you’ll see that the sequence number while set to 0 (zero) contains the letter ‘r’ inside it. The next packet contained the letter ‘o’ and the next one the letter ‘t’. Writing all these letters down we had this sequence:

r
o
t

q
r
n
q
o
r
r
s

That was a rot13 encrypted message! with google’s help we found a rot13 decryptor. The decrypted message was:
D E A D B E E F

That’s it! we had 3 out of 5 while no other team had more than 2. So we had wooooon! Congrats to everyone on our team!

Filed by kargig at 11:41 under Encryption,General,Internet,Linux,Networking,Privacy
Tags: fosscomm, Fosscomm 2011, fosswar, hd, hexdump, icmp, maisk, manji, mickflemm, Networking, rot13, scapy, split, steganography, trelo_mpifteki, wargame, wireshark
7 Comments | 10,410 views

Generic comments
I just got back home from Fosscomm 2011 and I must admit it has been one of the best organized events of this kind I’ve seen in Greece ever. The single most important fact was that presentations and workshops were always _on time_. They started on time, they finished on time. The organizers had to face even a power cut by the national energy company but they still managed not to fall behind on schedule. My only remark would be about the selection of the presentations that took place in the big room (called BA). Most of them gathered far less people than other presentations which took place in smaller rooms (B3 for example) and those rooms got extremely crowded from time to time. Maybe the organizers thought that generic open source presentations would attract more people than the technical ones but, unfortunately for them, and fortunately for “the greater good”, they were very wrong. This doesn’t reduce their achievement though. Another thing I would like to see on the next Fosscomm is less material given out to participants and instead spend this money on paying for travel expenses of people coming to speak on Fosscomm from abroad. Giving one (or even more) of the phones that HTC kindly provided to the voted by the participants best talk/presentation/workshop would also be very nice. My sincere congratulations to the organizing committee.

My IPv6 workshop
On my application to Fosscomm I had asked for one presentation and a separate workshop. This unfortunately wasn’t accepted, probably due to the large amount of other presentations/workshops, so I was given the first workshop on the very first day of Fosscomm, about “Using IPv6”- on Linux. Since I only had one hour, my original plans were to do a quick 15 min introductory presentation on IPv6 and then a 45 min hands-on lab. Since University of Patras could not provide IPv6 connectivity to the Lab, my other option was to have some remote VMs that would have upstream IPv6 connectivity and people on the Lab would ssh to. These VMs were kindly provided to us by Grnet and I have to publicly thank them one more time. My planning was bad though, people had far more questions about introductory IPv6 issues than I expected and the intro presentation was not finished until more than 35 mins had passed. This lead to the unfortunate result that the workshop could not be completed as I had planned. I am glad though that almost everyone logged into the VMs and had the chance to at least set up an IPv6 IP manually as well as an IPv6 default route. They also had their first ping6s. Some got even further by setting up ip6tables rules…What I definitely wanted to have shown during the workshop, and I didn’t have enough time to, was auto-configuration (SLAAC) which I consider to be one of the most intriguing features of IPv6. Next time I am doing either a presentation or a hands-on workshop, definitely not both in one session. Lesson learned.

Presentation/Workshop material:
Quick Intro to IPv6
Using IPv6 on Linux (workshop notes)

Talks I attended
All the talks I attended were very interesting, I probably did a very good job picking them 🙂 The ones I attended were:
Saturday
a) “A unified user account manager using LDAP/KRB5/CIFS” by Giorgos Mamalakis, Chariton Karamitas
b) “Network Exploitation with Ncrack” by Fotis Chatzis
c) “Wargames” by Patroklos Argyroudis, Fotis Chatzis, Chariton Karamitas
Sunday
a) “Intro to Arduino” by Pierros Papadeas, Kostas Antonakoglou
b) “Φωνή VoIPόντως εν τη ερήμω” by Effie Mouzeli
c) “Bright side of the Darknets” by Athanasios Kostopoulos
d) “Automated Testing Framework” by Giorgos Keramidas
e) “Performing Digital Forensics with Open Source tools” by Dimitrios Glynos
f) “Patras Heap Massacre” by Chariton Karamitas, Patroklos Argyroudis

I consider the most well presented one being: “Performing Digital Forensics with Open Source tools” while the one with the best slides was definitely: “Patras Heap Massacre”. If you weren’t there to see them, definitely try and find at least the slides if not the video.

Wargames
I had never participated before in any wargames because I considered that to be out of my league. That’s the reason I had not even registered for Fosscomm’s wargame called “fosswar”. I was curious though about what it’s like, so me and 3-4 more friends decided to stand in line and enter the room among the other people. The Lab room was crowded, really crowded. At first I thought that one reason for this would be the prize for the winner, an Android phone donated by HTC. I was later proven wrong though. Fosswar started and the organizers presented us with the 5 challenges. Two of those had to do something with networking…so I said to my self that I would be lucky even if I understood what one of those asked. Another challenge had to do with steganography, another one with exploiting a vulnerability in C and the last one was about reverse engineering. While this game could only have one winner, since me and my friends were not actually interested about the prize we decided to work as a team and see whether we can solve anything. Me and a friend looked at the first challenge, another 1 was looking at the third while 2 more were each looking at the fourth and fifth. During the wargame HTC asked for the names of people that wanted to take part in the competition, there nobody actually wanted to give his name. Most of them were there “just for the kicks”. That was even more exciting! HTC then told us that if nobody wanted to give his name the phone would be given on a lottery…so 10-15 people decided to give our names so the phone would “stay” at the fosswar. After solving the first challenge we got so excited that we just had to try the others, we couldn’t give up. So, after 3 hours of thinking and coding, the result was that our team managed to solve 3 of the five challenges, the details on what the challenges were and how we dealt with them will follow in a separate blog post, and we ended up being the winners because no other team had solved more than two. Yes, we had won! We had managed to solve the two networking challenges and the steganography one. That was soooo unexpected!

Pictures
My pictures from Fosscomm 2011 are at: https://picasaweb.google.com/kargig/2011050720110508Fosscomm2011#

My conclusion
Fosscomm this year definitely showed a trend. People don’t need generic presentations about open source any more, they know what it is, they believe in it, they use it. People really ask for technical presentations, and we need more of them.

Whoever couldn’t manage to attend Fosscomm 2011, should definitely attend Fosscomm 2012. I am certainly looking forward to it!

Filed by kargig at 01:23 under Greek,Internet,IPv6,Linux,Networking,Privacy,VoIP
Tags: fosscomm, Fosscomm 2011, Greek, ipv6, Linux, Open Source, presentation, wargame, workshop
5 Comments | 8,659 views

This weekend, 7-8 May 2011, I’ll be doing a workshop about “IPv6 usage on Linux” at Fosscomm 2011 conference. Fosscomm is the biggest Greek Open Source conference with lots of interesting presentations, workshops and events. In the spirit of enabling IPv6 wherever possible, I am very happy to have managed to enable IPv6 connectivity for the website of Fosscomm this year!

During the workshop I will try to show the necessary tools to use, debug network problems and configure various services for IPv6. My goal is to explain to participants the abolishment of NAT, introduce the concepts of SLAAC and DHCPv6 and show them how to configure their networks to effectively use IPv6. If there’s enough time some issues related to IPv6 security will also be discussed. Target audience is people who are not afraid of the command line, have basic networking skills and are eager to learn things regarding IPv6!

Unfortunately it was impossible to have IPv6 upstream connectivity at the LAB, so participants will be testing everything on an IPv6 enabled remote infrastructure. Due to the limited number of LAB computers and Virtual Machines available, only 35, there is a registration form for participants to fill in. Please take the time to fill in the form any specific topics that you would like the workshop to pay attention to.

The workshop is taking place on Saturday 07/05/2011 and it will start _exactly_ at 10:45 in order to take full advantage of the time given to us by Fosscomm’s organizers.

Workshop is supported by the Greek IPv6 Taskforce and there miiiight be IPv6-related material distributed to the participants.

Please don’t forget to fill in the registration form!!!

Filed by kargig at 22:32 under Internet,IPv6,Linux,Networking
Tags: 2011, DHCPv6, fosscomm, ipv6, slaac, workshop
No Comments | 6,527 views

A sample config for PPPoE clients connecting to a Cisco BRAS. The following example uses Stateless Address Autoconfiguration (SLAAC) to provide an IPv6 /64 subnet to clients on their PPP interface and DHCPv6 for Prefix Delegation in order to provide to a /56 subnet to them.

ipv6 unicast-routing
ipv6 general-prefix ISP-PREFIX 2001:DB8:BBBB::/48
ipv6 cef
ipv6 dhcp pool v6dhcppool
prefix-delegation pool v6prefixpool2
dns-server 2001:DB8:DDDD::1
dns-server 2001:DB8:EEEE::1
sip address 2001:DB8:CCCC::1
sip domain-name ipv6-test.example.com
Interface FastEthernet0/0.100
[ snip ]
ipv6 address ISP-PREFIX ::1:0:0:0:1/64
ipv6 enable
ipv6 mtu 1492
ipv6 nd reachable-time 30
ipv6 nd ra-interval 10
ipv6 nd ra-lifetime 3600
ipv6 nd prefix 2001:DB8:AAAA:2222::/64 86400 3600 off-link
ipv6 nd other-config-flag
ipv6 dhcp server v6dhcppool
!
Interface Virtual-Template1
[ snip ]
ipv6 unnumbered FastEthernet0/0.100
ipv6 enable
ipv6 mtu 1480
ipv6 nd reachable-time 30
ipv6 nd ra-interval 10
ipv6 nd ra-lifetime 3600
ipv6 nd prefix default infinite infinite off-link
ipv6 nd prefix 2001:DB8:BBBB:CCCC::/64 86400 3600 off-link
no ipv6 nd suppress-ra
ipv6 nd other-config-flag
ipv6 dhcp server v6dhcppool
peer default ipv6 pool v6prefixpool2
!
ipv6 local pool v6prefixpool 2001:DB8:9999:8800::/56 64
ipv6 local pool v6prefixpool2 2001:DB8:8888::/48 56

As the above config is just an example it uses the appropriate address space that IPv6 provides for examples, 2001:db8::/32

Hope it helps someone…

Filed by kargig at 23:25 under Internet,IPv6,Networking
Tags: bras, Cisco, DHCPv6, ipv6, PPP, Prefix Delegation, slaac, Stateless Address Autoconfiguration
No Comments | 10,822 views

Some months ago (exactly 4 actually) I had posted that void.gr was then accessible over IPv6. Today void.gr is accessible over native IPv6 thanks to my hosting provider, Leaseweb.

About a year ago I had asked Leaseweb for IPv6 support and their reply wasn’t very promising. It seemed that they weren’t really looking forward to providing IPv6 for their dedicated server clients yet. Today though I thought I should ask again, even if IPv6 support for their dedicated servers is still not referenced anywhere. And I got lucky! They offered me a /64.

So void.gr is from now accessible over IPv6 at 2001:1af8:4100:a000:4::131.

Accessing my server over IPv6 from my home’s native IPv6 connection, thanks to OTE providing beta IPv6 access to subscribers, seems a bit faster than accessing it via IPv4. Ping times are usually 4-5ms better. Looks like IPv6 connections are not that crowded as IPv4 are 🙂

The setup is pretty straightforward. Even if Debian Wiki is not very clear about how to setup IPv6, here’s what you have to do if you, like me, have a server with a native IPv6 connection.

# vi /etc/network/interfaces
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
    address 85.17.162.131
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    gateway 85.17.162.254
    network 85.17.162.0
    broadcast 85.17.162.255
iface eth0 inet6 static
    address 2001:1af8:4100:a000:4::131
    netmask 64
    gateway 2001:1AF8:4100:A000::1

Then of course you need to edit your Apache configuration to add the IPv6 vhosts.

P.S. I am still waiting an answer as to whether I can manage the reverse delegation of the IPv6 address space Leasweb gave me since I can’t do that from the control panel. I’ll post any updates on the ticket when I have some news…

Filed by kargig at 22:23 under Internet,IPv6,Linux,Networking
Tags: debian, hosting, Internet, ipv6, Linux, Networking
No Comments | 6,264 views

For the past 1,5 years I’ve been messing (again) a lot with IPv6. The first time I started looking at the protocol was back in 2002-2003 when I was working at the Network Operations Center of my university. I had set up a couple of links between routers and tried various connectivity experiments mainly using some Cisco routers and Linux boxes. This time I started looking at it more seriously, mainly because I wanted to add support for it on the xDSL Linux-based routers/CPEs the company I currently work for produces. (GENNET, yes I know that the company’s website is UGLY…or worse than that…).

The task wasn’t easy, lots of backporting and fixing on both kernel-space and user-space had to be done. Luckily my colleagues were very helpful when I needed them. I have to say though that the main obstacle on working on it were not the technical difficulties but trying to convince our management that they had to give me time to work on it. It took a while (months…) to convince them but the end result is that all our models are now IPv6 capable. I am pretty glad that our product is referenced at the website of the first Greek ISP to start experimenting with IPv6 (Gennet OxyGen on ipv6.ote.gr). Being presented on the same page as the Cisco and the AVM CPEs is not bad at all!

Out of this process I learned quite a lot on IPv6, so when Dimitris Kalamaras, the editor of the new Greek Linux magazine Linux Inside, asked me to write an article for the first issue of the new magazine, there wasn’t actually a choice. I would write about IPv6, and so I did. I had written articles in the past for another Greek Linux Magazine called LinuxFormat, which was an adaptation of the English one. I’ve put the pdfs of my previous articles at my blog under Presentations/Articles.

My article is about the history if Internet Protocols (IPv4, IPv6), which were the needs that drove IPv6 development and a small intro to some of the changes that the new protocol brings to our life. There is also some information on how to connect using tunnels and so on. The article serves just as an introduction to IPv6, if there’s feedback I will write something more extended and maybe more technical. The timing of the article couldn’t be any better, magazine was out in the streets on 02 February 2011 and IANA pool run out of IPv4 addresses on 03 February 2011. Just perfect!

I will publish the pdf of the article along with my other articles on magazines/newspapers after a couple of months have passed, just to be fair with the magazine’s publishing company. Until then, go buy the magazine, there are many interesting and original articles inside it.

Filed by kargig at 13:47 under Internet,IPv6,Linux,Networking
Tags: article, ipv6, Linux, linux inside, magazine, Networking, publication, router
5 Comments | 8,332 views

The pet-project of GrRBL,which is an IP-based blacklist, The Greek Spammers Email Addresses Blacklist, previously described at a previous post of mine, has grown to 400++ verified addresses of Greek spammers.

From now on, apart from the usual rsync access to anyone who asks for it, there will be a public link on the web with a PGP/GPG signed list of the spammers for anyone to get. The public link will not update as often as the list from rsync, probably once or twice per month is enough.

For anyone who wants to read a bit more: http://grrbl.void.gr/#email_blacklist.

Direct link to the signed Greek Spammers Email Addresses Blacklist.

Don’t forget to read the disclaimer and to submit greek spam at GrRBL Submission.

Filed by kargig at 20:01 under Greek,Internet,Linux,Networking,Privacy
Tags: blacklist, gpg, Greek, grrbl, spam, spammers
No Comments | 7,435 views

phpMyAdmin is a great tool but a constant headache (xss, sql injections,etc) as well. Every now and then there are new security holes discovered that need to be fixed ASAP. On the other hand, Plesk doesn’t seem to follow these security fixes, so if you want to keep yourself a bit more secure than Plesk thinks you should be, then you have to upgrade phpMyAdmin by your self. This procedure isn’t very straightforward due to the way Plesk uses PMA so I’ll post here some notes/guidelines on how to achieve that.

My notes are based on Plesk 8.6, so I am sure newer Plesk versions are way easier to upgrade than this.

Step 1: Download new phpMyAdmin
# wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/phpmyadmin/phpMyAdmin/3.3.8/phpMyAdmin-3.3.8-all-languages.tar.gz
Step 2: Extract into /opt/psa/admin/htdocs/domains/databases/

# mv phpMyAdmin-3.3.8-all-languages.tar.gz /opt/psa/admin/htdocs/domains/databases/
# cd /opt/psa/admin/htdocs/domains/databases/
# tar zxf phpMyAdmin-3.3.8-all-languages.tar.gz

Step 3: Rename old PMA and symlink the new

# mv phpMyAdmin phpMyAdmin.old
# ln -sf phpMyAdmin-3.3.8-all-languages phpMyAdmin

Step 4: Copy old config file
This step depends on your old PMA version. Since my version was 2.8.2.4 I had to:
#cp phpMyAdmin.old/libraries/config.default.php phpMyAdmin/config.inc.php
If you have newer versions of PMA just do:
#cp phpMyAdmin.old/config.inc.php phpMyAdmin/config.inc.php
Step 5: Edit necessary files
Substep a: edit phpMyAdmin/libraries/session.inc.php
When the first comment block finishes and before line 14: if (! defined('PHPMYADMIN')) {
add the following snippet:

// Close Plesk's session.
$proxy_session_id = session_id();
@session_write_close();
unset($_SESSION);

Substep b: edit phpMyAdmin/libraries/common.inc.php around line 190 and change:

    'error_handler',
    'PMA_PHP_SELF',
    'variables_whitelist',
    'key'
);

to

'error_handler',
    'PMA_PHP_SELF',
    'variables_whitelist',
    'key',
    // from Plesk
    'PHP_SELF',
    'db_host',
    'db_port',
    'db_user',
    'db_pass',
    'db_name'
);

!! Mind the “,” after ‘key’ !!

That’s about it…you should now be able to use your new PMA version through Plesk.

Filed by kargig at 20:49 under Internet,Linux,Networking
Tags: config, debian, phpmyadmin, plesk, PMA, security, sql injection, vhost, xss
8 Comments | 15,740 views

Since Leaseweb, the hosting company where void.gr’s server is located, isn’t yet ready to provide native IPv6 to dedicated servers, I decided not to wait for them any longer and to set up an IPv6 tunnel to tunnelbroker.net so that I make void.gr accessible over IPv6.

Setting up the tunnel is extremely easy. Having the following in my /etc/rc.conf does the trick:

ip tunnel add he-ipv6 mode sit remote 216.66.84.46 local 85.17.162.131 ttl 255
ip link set he-ipv6 up
ip addr add 2001:470:1f14:e0a::2/64 dev he-ipv6
ip route add ::/0 dev he-ipv6
ip addr add 2001:470:1f15:e0a::1/64 dev eth2

Yes, I know I could have used some of debian’s config files for these parameters…Oh and you “ifconfig” users, time to give up using that ancient tool, it’s time you learn how to use “ip”.

So for you people who have IPv6 connectivity, just try it. The current IP of void.gr is 2001:470:1f15:e0a::1. Ping6 it 🙂

Time is ticking away…bye bye IPv4: http://ipv6.he.net/statistics/

Filed by kargig at 21:02 under Internet,Linux,Networking
Tags: debian, ipv4, ipv6, Linux, Networking, tunnel, tunnelbroker, tunnelbroker.net, void, void.gr
2 Comments | 8,491 views

Plesk is surely not ready for IPv6. Despite that fact, many people – me included, have the DNS records of their favorite domains managed by Plesk and still want to be able to add some IPv6 records to those.

Some time ago I had posted on my twitter account a link to another blog that had a “hackish way” to add AAAA records to Plesk. I have written a slightly more elegant shell script (to be run by root only) than the one provided by experimentalworks.

First of all you _need_ to alter dns_recs table of the psa database to allow AAAA records:

# mysql -u admin -p psa 
mysql> alter table dns_recs modify column type enum('NS','A','AAAA','CNAME','MX','PTR','TXT','SRV','master','none') NOT NULL default 'A'; 

Then download my plesk-AAAA.sh script and use it like the following example.

To add www.foobar.gr to point to 2001:db8:1001::1

Usage: ./plesk-AAAA.sh [zone serial]
#./plesk-AAAA.sh foobar.gr www 2001:db8:1001::1
#./plesk-AAAA.sh foobar.gr ipv6 2001:db8:1001::1 12

Known bug/feature:
If you add a record without adding a serial, for the soa record, at the end, it will add the serial of the domain in the form:

YYYYMMDD10

So if you add two ipv6 hosts in the same day for the same domain you _have_ to manually add a serial >10 for the second host (and so forth).

For the ones who don’t like downloading but would like to see the script source, here it is:

  1 #!/bin/sh
  2 
  3 usage () {
  4         echo "Usage: $0 <domain> <hostname> <v6 IP> [zone serial]"
  5         echo "Usage: $0 foobar.gr www 2001:db8:1001::1"
  6         exit 1
  7 }
  8 
  9 if [ $# -lt 3 ]; then
 10         usage
 11 fi
 12 DOMAIN=$1
 13 HOSTNAME=$2
 14 v6IP=$3
 15 INPUT_SERIAL=${4:-10}
 16 FULLHOST="$2.$1."
 17 
 18 ADMIN_PASS=`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow`
 19 MYSQL_BIN_D=`grep MYSQL_BIN_D /etc/psa/psa.conf | awk '{print $2}'`
 20 PRODUCT_ROOT_D=`grep PRODUCT_ROOT_D /etc/psa/psa.conf | awk '{print $2}'`
 21 SERIAL=`date +%Y%m%d${INPUT_SERIAL}`
 22 mysql="${MYSQL_BIN_D}/mysql -N -uadmin -p${ADMIN_PASS} psa"
 23 
 24 query1="SELECT dns_zone_id FROM dns_recs where host like \"$DOMAIN%\" LIMIT 0,1"
 25 ZONE_ID=`echo "$query1" | $mysql`
 26 echo "ZONE_ID=$ZONE_ID"
 27 query2="INSERT INTO dns_recs (displayHost, host, displayVal, val, type, dns_zone_id) VALUES ('$FULLHOST', '$FULLHOST', '$v6IP', '$v6IP', 'AAAA',$ZONE_ID)"
 28 echo "$query2" | $mysql
 29 
 30 query3="UPDATE dns_zone SET serial=\"$SERIAL\" WHERE id=$ZONE_ID LIMIT 1;"
 31 echo "$query3" | $mysql
 32 
 33 echo "REBUILDING zone file for $DOMAIN"
 34 $PRODUCT_ROOT_D/admin/sbin/dnsmng update $DOMAIN

The script has been tested with bash and zsh. I have no idea whether it works under any other shells.
The script probably won’t delete your databases, but…use it at your own risk 🙂 I hope someone finds it useful.

Filed by kargig at 20:10 under Internet,Linux,Networking
Tags: aaaa, aaaa record, bash, dns, ipv6, Linux, Networking, plesk, script, shell, zsh
2 Comments | 8,329 views

It’s been exactly 6 years (!) since I started this blog: http://www.void.gr/kargig/blog/2004/07/18/hey-ho-lets-go/…

Too bad I don’t have as much free time as I had in the past to post about interesting things. It’s a also a time for a redesign…I think I have the same theme for more than 5 years…

Anyway, GrRBL got redesigned yesterday by Christine and now there’s also a submission form for those who prefer it over forwarding emails. I also merged my other Greek spammers email addresses blacklist with lists by a couple of friends (postmasters) and now the list contains over 300 unique, verified, spammer addresses. This list is not yet public but if you are interested to use it and test it, give me a shout and I’ll give you access.

Filed by kargig at 12:42 under General,Linux,Networking
Tags: anniversary, blacklist, blog, Greek, grrbl, rbl, redesign, spam, void, wordpress
2 Comments | 6,700 views

GrRBL
In the beginning of the year I announced my RBL for Greek spam emails. The blacklist is growing larger by the day, thanks to some really kind people forwarding me their Greek spam emails, and has reached more than 120 IP addresses of verified Greek spammers.This alone though is not enough.

Why
Some spammers use their aDSL lines which have dynamic IPs to send their massive email “newsletters”. These people are split into 2 sub-categories. The ones that use their own PC as an SMTP server and the ones who use their ISP’s mail server as SMTP. I’ve tried to complain to some of their ISPs…some replied back saying that they were willing to look into the issue (but did nothing at all in the end) and others did not even reply to me. For both sub-categories, GrRBL is ineffective since I can’t add dynamic IPs in the blacklist nor can I add the IPs of the email servers of those major Greek ISPs.

Another category of spammers is the one that uses their gmail/yahoo accounts to send their emails. GrRBL is ineffective for this category as well since I can’t add gmail/yahoo to the blacklist…

What
So there was no alternative but to gather all those email addresses of these 2 categories above and add them to a new blacklist, one that will contain email addresses. I use this blacklist with my spamassassin configuration to eliminate Greek spam that GrRBL can’t. Each time I receive (or someone forwards me) a new Greek spam, I add the “From:” email address to this new blacklist. This new blacklist grows far more aggressively than GrRBL since it’s a lot easier to gather the data and already has more than 140 addresses.

Distribution
There are two available formats of the blacklist, one ready for use by spamassassin and another one with clear formatting ready to be used even by SMTPs to drop these spam emails without even touching your inbox.
The blacklist is currently only distributed to a group of well trusted people and it is available only through rsync with a username/password.

I don’t want to make the list completely public yet, but if you are interested you can request it at the contact email of GrRBL and I will reply to you about accessing it.

Sidenote
If you need a good tool to check a host again some RBLs, adnsrblcheck by Yiorgos Adamopoulos is the way to go (and it includes GrRBL!)

Filed by kargig at 23:15 under Linux,Networking
Tags: blacklist, email, Greek, greek spam, grrbl, Internet, Linux, Networking, spam, spamassassin
3 Comments | 18,363 views