Setup OpenVPN anonymous VPN connection on Ubuntu Linux
Install a standard command OpenVPN install packages
sudo apt-get install openvpn
Saturday, September 5, 2015
Setup OpenVPN anonymous VPN connection on Ubuntu Linux
Install a standard command OpenVPN install packages
Dendroid Botnet Setup
Dendroid Botnet Setup
Android Botnet “DENDROID”
A botnet is a collection of Internet-connected programs communicating with other similar programs in order to perform tasks which can be controlled from anywhere by remotely accessing the panel of the server system. This can be as mundane as keeping control of an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel, or it could be used to send spam email or participate in distributed denial-of-service attacks and do other things like cypto currency mining and stealing informations. The term is usually used with a negative or malicious connotation.
This one “Dendroid” which is a botnet especially developed for attacking android user’s which has the functionalities like
ü Media volume up/down
ü Ringer volume up/down
ü Screen On
Which can turn on screen remotely
ü Record Calls
ü Block SMS
ü Record Audio
ü Take Video
ü Take Photo
ü Send Text
ü Send Contacts
ü Get user accounts
Which can get the user accounts that are being used in that mobile
ü Call Number
ü Delete Call Logs
ü Open Webpage
ü Update the app
ü Delete Files ( audio, video, pictures, calls )
ü Get Browser History
ü Get Browser Bookmarks
ü Get Call History
ü Open Dialog Box
ü Get Inbox SMS
ü HTTP flood
Which will make the phone slow by sending large number of HTTP requests
CERT-IN WARNING ON DENDROID
The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN) warned about a currently active Dendroid malware campaign that is spreading across India, targeting Android users.(Beware that botnet is actually targeting the Indian user’s)
"It has been reported that a malicious toolkit called DENDROID is being used to create trojanized applications that infects Android-based Smartphones. The malware is created by modifying the required permissions by any clean APK (Android Application Package) with Dendroid RAT functionality that allows detailed management of the infected devices," the Computer Emergency Response Team of India (CERT-In) said in its latest advisory. The botnet is being discovered by the Symantec researchers.
This is how the panel of the botnet looks like
Requirements:
Dendroid Source
Android SDK with Ellipse (Java RE 7 is needed)
Web server with PHP, MySql, (Ion Cube LoaderVPS or free webhostings)
phpmyadmin (For Easy Database setup) localhost or an webhosting
Step 1:
Download these necessary files from here
Step 2:
Extract those files into a new folder
Extract those files into a new folder and copy those to the domains root directory or to the htdocs in the local system. The files can be uploaded to the server using filezilla or by using the file manager and then you have to set permissions for the files you have set the permission to 777 this can be done for linux hostings and vps by using the command chmod .
Step 3:
Open the panel folder then you will see the multiple php files you need to change the url of the server to your webhost url or the ip address change the url of the server as show in the picture for reg.php, applysettings.php, blockbot.php ,deletebot.php ,deletefile.php ,deletepics.php ,functions.php, table.php
Step 4:
Now create an database with full rights in the cpanel and go to your Phpmyadmin. (For Cpanel, Create a new DB and then click the Phpmyadmin icon *Note write down the server ip or name listed for the database*) Keep in note the password because you need to enter the Database user name and password while configuring the panel . If u enter the password incorrectly then your database wont be able to update the botnets and WONT work. After creating the database go to import and import the sql file present in the otherfiles folder which is being located in the panel.zip
Step 5:
After that go the panel user by navigating to your domain name that you given in your php files usually the domain link the panel configuration page will open you need to fill the username and password infos of database and panel as you needed
Step 6:
After that open the eclipse software and import the project files of the dendroid apk and then change the panel url and password it must be same as you give in the above step but u must have to encrypt it using the base64 algorithm it can be done by using this site https://www.base64encode.org/
Step 7:
After that you have to compile the files into an apk you can find it in the build path that will be located in the bin folder that apk can be directly used or it can be binded with other apps to hide it. Once you install it the app will be installed in a fake name. Once if the victim installs the apk the phone will be compromised then you can control it through the panel
Android Botnet “DENDROID”
A botnet is a collection of Internet-connected programs communicating with other similar programs in order to perform tasks which can be controlled from anywhere by remotely accessing the panel of the server system. This can be as mundane as keeping control of an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel, or it could be used to send spam email or participate in distributed denial-of-service attacks and do other things like cypto currency mining and stealing informations. The term is usually used with a negative or malicious connotation.
This one “Dendroid” which is a botnet especially developed for attacking android user’s which has the functionalities like
ü Media volume up/down
ü Ringer volume up/down
ü Screen On
Which can turn on screen remotely
ü Record Calls
ü Block SMS
ü Record Audio
ü Take Video
ü Take Photo
ü Send Text
ü Send Contacts
ü Get user accounts
Which can get the user accounts that are being used in that mobile
ü Call Number
ü Delete Call Logs
ü Open Webpage
ü Update the app
ü Delete Files ( audio, video, pictures, calls )
ü Get Browser History
ü Get Browser Bookmarks
ü Get Call History
ü Open Dialog Box
ü Get Inbox SMS
ü HTTP flood
Which will make the phone slow by sending large number of HTTP requests
CERT-IN WARNING ON DENDROID
The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN) warned about a currently active Dendroid malware campaign that is spreading across India, targeting Android users.(Beware that botnet is actually targeting the Indian user’s)
"It has been reported that a malicious toolkit called DENDROID is being used to create trojanized applications that infects Android-based Smartphones. The malware is created by modifying the required permissions by any clean APK (Android Application Package) with Dendroid RAT functionality that allows detailed management of the infected devices," the Computer Emergency Response Team of India (CERT-In) said in its latest advisory. The botnet is being discovered by the Symantec researchers.
This is how the panel of the botnet looks like
Requirements:
Dendroid Source
Android SDK with Ellipse (Java RE 7 is needed)
Web server with PHP, MySql, (Ion Cube LoaderVPS or free webhostings)
phpmyadmin (For Easy Database setup) localhost or an webhosting
Step 1:
Download these necessary files from here
Step 2:
Extract those files into a new folder
Extract those files into a new folder and copy those to the domains root directory or to the htdocs in the local system. The files can be uploaded to the server using filezilla or by using the file manager and then you have to set permissions for the files you have set the permission to 777 this can be done for linux hostings and vps by using the command chmod .
Step 3:
Open the panel folder then you will see the multiple php files you need to change the url of the server to your webhost url or the ip address change the url of the server as show in the picture for reg.php, applysettings.php, blockbot.php ,deletebot.php ,deletefile.php ,deletepics.php ,functions.php, table.php
Step 4:
Now create an database with full rights in the cpanel and go to your Phpmyadmin. (For Cpanel, Create a new DB and then click the Phpmyadmin icon *Note write down the server ip or name listed for the database*) Keep in note the password because you need to enter the Database user name and password while configuring the panel . If u enter the password incorrectly then your database wont be able to update the botnets and WONT work. After creating the database go to import and import the sql file present in the otherfiles folder which is being located in the panel.zip
Step 5:
After that go the panel user by navigating to your domain name that you given in your php files usually the domain link the panel configuration page will open you need to fill the username and password infos of database and panel as you needed
Step 6:
After that open the eclipse software and import the project files of the dendroid apk and then change the panel url and password it must be same as you give in the above step but u must have to encrypt it using the base64 algorithm it can be done by using this site https://www.base64encode.org/
Step 7:
After that you have to compile the files into an apk you can find it in the build path that will be located in the bin folder that apk can be directly used or it can be binded with other apps to hide it. Once you install it the app will be installed in a fake name. Once if the victim installs the apk the phone will be compromised then you can control it through the panel
How to Install LAMP in Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS
How to Install LAMP in Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS
This tutorial will explains basic step how to install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP or Perl) server in ubuntu server 14.04 LTS. The acronym LAMP is derived from first letters of Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python.
Linux is a Unix-like and POSIX-compliant operating system. Ubuntu Server is one of popular Linux distributions dedicated for server environment.
Apache is a HTTP web server, the most popular in use. It serves webpages when they’re requested by the web browsers. When you type an URL on your web server and press Enter, the pages you see on screen is most likely served by Apache webserver.
MySQL is a database management system now owned by Oracle Corporation. It stores and organizes references to the information the webserver needs.
PHP is a reflective programming language, which makes it possible for all these different parts to work together.
This tutorial assumes that you have already installed Ubuntu Server 14.04 correctly in you machine, if you need guide basic install ubuntu server 14.04 you can read here.
Install and Configure Apache2
First, update ubuntu repository with the following command :
sudo apt-get update
Install Apache2 and all related dependencies with these command:
sudo apt-get install apache2 apache2-utils
Once apache2 installed, modify file /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.conf, with your favorite editor. I’ll used nano command:
sudo nano /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.conf
You should see the following line:
<IfModule mod_dir.c>
DirectoryIndex index.html index.cgi index.pl index.php index.xhtml index.htm
</IfModule>
Change to:
<IfModule mod_dir.c>
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.cgi index.pl index.xhtml index.htm
</IfModule>
Restart apache2 with following command:
sudo service apache2 restart
Now you can check out apache2 is working or not by visiting your server’s public IP address or domain from your web browser ( http://ip_address or http://domain.com). If it work you will see the default Ubuntu 14.04 Apache web page, which is there for informational and testing purposes. It should look something like this:
Install and Configure MySQL Server
To install Mysql Server package and all related package dependencies run the followong command:
sudo apt-get install mysql-server libapache2-mod-auth-mysql php5-mysql
During the installation, you’ll be asked to setup the MySQL root user password. This is an administrative account in MySQL that has increased privileges, Enter the password and select [OK].
After the mysql server installation complete, you need to run some command for tell MySQL to create database directory structure where it will store its information. You can do this by typing the following command:
sudo mysql_install_db
Run the following command, It will be ask you to enter the password for the MySQL root account. Next, it will ask you if you want to change that password. If you are happy with your current password, type “n” for “no”. It also ask you to remove some sample users and databases, disable remote root logins, and load these new rules so that MySQL immediately respects the changes you have made.
sudo mysql_secure_installation
Install and Configure PHP5
To install PHP5 package and all related package dependencies run the following command below. by default ubuntu server 14.04 will installed PHP 5.5
sudo apt-get install php5 php5-mysql php-pear php5-gd php5-mcrypt php5-curl
Testing PHP5 and MySQL
In order to test PHP script you need to create simple PHP script in directory /var/www/html. in this case I’ll create phpinfo.php:
sudo touch /var/www/html/phpinfo.php
sudo nano /var/www/html/phpinfo.php
Add the following line into file /var/www/html/phpinfo.php
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
Save and exit ( Ctrl + O, Ctrl + X)
Test the php script you have made from web browser by typing in address bar http://ip_address/phpinfo.php. It will appear like screenshot on below.
This page basically gives you information about your server from the perspective of PHP. It is useful for debugging and to ensure that your settings are being applied correctly.
Testing MySQL connection with PHP script. Create the file /var/www/html/phpmysql.php then add the following line on below. Replace the password with your mysql root password have made during mysql installation:
sudo touch /var/www/html/phpmysql.php
sudo nano /var/www/html/phpmysql.php
<?php
$con = mysql_connect("localhost","root","password");
if (!$con)
{
die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
}
else
{
echo "Congrats! connection established successfully";
}
mysql_close($con);
?>
Now open web browser and navigate to http://ip_address/phpmysql.php, The page should be appear like screenshot on below:
This tutorial will explains basic step how to install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP or Perl) server in ubuntu server 14.04 LTS. The acronym LAMP is derived from first letters of Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python.
Linux is a Unix-like and POSIX-compliant operating system. Ubuntu Server is one of popular Linux distributions dedicated for server environment.
Apache is a HTTP web server, the most popular in use. It serves webpages when they’re requested by the web browsers. When you type an URL on your web server and press Enter, the pages you see on screen is most likely served by Apache webserver.
MySQL is a database management system now owned by Oracle Corporation. It stores and organizes references to the information the webserver needs.
PHP is a reflective programming language, which makes it possible for all these different parts to work together.
This tutorial assumes that you have already installed Ubuntu Server 14.04 correctly in you machine, if you need guide basic install ubuntu server 14.04 you can read here.
Install and Configure Apache2
First, update ubuntu repository with the following command :
sudo apt-get update
Install Apache2 and all related dependencies with these command:
sudo apt-get install apache2 apache2-utils
Once apache2 installed, modify file /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.conf, with your favorite editor. I’ll used nano command:
sudo nano /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.conf
You should see the following line:
<IfModule mod_dir.c>
DirectoryIndex index.html index.cgi index.pl index.php index.xhtml index.htm
</IfModule>
Change to:
<IfModule mod_dir.c>
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.cgi index.pl index.xhtml index.htm
</IfModule>
Restart apache2 with following command:
sudo service apache2 restart
Now you can check out apache2 is working or not by visiting your server’s public IP address or domain from your web browser ( http://ip_address or http://domain.com). If it work you will see the default Ubuntu 14.04 Apache web page, which is there for informational and testing purposes. It should look something like this:
Install and Configure MySQL Server
To install Mysql Server package and all related package dependencies run the followong command:
sudo apt-get install mysql-server libapache2-mod-auth-mysql php5-mysql
During the installation, you’ll be asked to setup the MySQL root user password. This is an administrative account in MySQL that has increased privileges, Enter the password and select [OK].
After the mysql server installation complete, you need to run some command for tell MySQL to create database directory structure where it will store its information. You can do this by typing the following command:
sudo mysql_install_db
Run the following command, It will be ask you to enter the password for the MySQL root account. Next, it will ask you if you want to change that password. If you are happy with your current password, type “n” for “no”. It also ask you to remove some sample users and databases, disable remote root logins, and load these new rules so that MySQL immediately respects the changes you have made.
sudo mysql_secure_installation
Install and Configure PHP5
To install PHP5 package and all related package dependencies run the following command below. by default ubuntu server 14.04 will installed PHP 5.5
sudo apt-get install php5 php5-mysql php-pear php5-gd php5-mcrypt php5-curl
Testing PHP5 and MySQL
In order to test PHP script you need to create simple PHP script in directory /var/www/html. in this case I’ll create phpinfo.php:
sudo touch /var/www/html/phpinfo.php
sudo nano /var/www/html/phpinfo.php
Add the following line into file /var/www/html/phpinfo.php
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
Save and exit ( Ctrl + O, Ctrl + X)
Test the php script you have made from web browser by typing in address bar http://ip_address/phpinfo.php. It will appear like screenshot on below.
This page basically gives you information about your server from the perspective of PHP. It is useful for debugging and to ensure that your settings are being applied correctly.
Testing MySQL connection with PHP script. Create the file /var/www/html/phpmysql.php then add the following line on below. Replace the password with your mysql root password have made during mysql installation:
sudo touch /var/www/html/phpmysql.php
sudo nano /var/www/html/phpmysql.php
<?php
$con = mysql_connect("localhost","root","password");
if (!$con)
{
die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
}
else
{
echo "Congrats! connection established successfully";
}
mysql_close($con);
?>
Now open web browser and navigate to http://ip_address/phpmysql.php, The page should be appear like screenshot on below:
How to Install The Latest Eclipse Release in Ubuntu 14.04
This quick tutorial is going to show you how to install the latest release of Eclipse, while the Ubuntu repositories has an very old version.
So far, the latest is Eclipse Kepler (4.3.2). You can follow below steps to install it on Ubuntu 14.04 or other Ubuntu releases.
1. Install Java.
If you don’t have Java installed on your system. Click the link below to bring up Ubuntu Software Center and click install OpenJDK Java 7:
Or, install Oracle Java from this link.
2. Download Eclipse from its website
You may check out your OS Type 32-bit or 64-bit by going to System Settings -> Details -> Overview
3. Extract Eclipse to /opt/ for global use
Press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, run the command below to extract Eclipse to /opt/:
Don’t like Linux commands? You can do this by opening Nautilus file browser via root: Press Alt+F2 -> run gksudo nautilus.
Once done, you should see the eclipse folder under /opt/ directory.
4. Create a launcher shortcut for Eclipse
Press Ctrl+Alt+T, paste below command into the terminal and hit enter.
gksudo gedit /usr/share/applications/eclipse.desktop
Above command will create and open the launcher file for eclipse with gedit text editor.
Paste below content into the opened file and save it.
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Eclipse 4
Type=Application
Exec=/opt/eclipse/eclipse
Terminal=false
Icon=/opt/eclipse/icon.xpm
Comment=Integrated Development Environment
NoDisplay=false
Categories=Development;IDE;
Name[en]=Eclipse
Finally open Eclipse from Unity Dash search results and enjoy!
Friday, September 4, 2015
how to hack android phone
How to Hack Millions of Android Phones Using Stagefright Bug, Without Sending MMS
how-to-hack-android-phone
Earlier this week, security researchers at Zimperium revealed a high-severity vulnerability in Android platforms that allowed a single multimedia text message to hack 950 Million Android smartphones and tablets.
As explained in our previous article, the critical flaw resides in a core Android component called "Stagefright," a native Android media playback library used by Android to process, record and play multimedia files.
To Exploit Stagefright vulnerability, which is actively being exploited in the wild, all an attacker needed is your phone number to send a malicious MMS message and compromise your Android device with no action, no indication required from your side.
Hacking Without Knowing Phone Number
But, Now you Don’t even require the mobile numbers of your victims to infect their devices, a recent research claimed.
In the previously known attack scenario, an attacker can exploit Stagefright vulnerability only against his/her known contact numbers. That means the attacker needs phone numbers of the targeted Android devices.
Such Attack Scenario is not practically possible, because in case attackers want to infect large number of audience they require bulk phone numbers of the targeted devices, even if they have Million dollar balance to send large number of National/International MMS.
New Ways to Trigger Stagefright Vulnerability
Security researchers from Trend Micro have discovered two new attack scenarios that could trigger Stagefright vulnerability without sending malicious multimedia messages:
Trigger Exploit from Android Application
Crafted HTML exploit to Target visitors of a Webpage on the Internet
These two new Stagefright attack vectors carry more serious security implications than the previous one, as an attacker could exploit the bug remotely to:
Hack millions of Android devices, without knowing their phone numbers and spending a penny.
Steal Massive Amount of data.
Built a botnet network of Hacked Android Devices, etc.
“The specially crafted MP4 file will cause mediaserver‘s heap to be destroyed or exploited,” researchers explained how an application could be used to trigger Stagefright attack.
Video Demonstration: 'App' Attack Vector
And to trigger if from a web page for all its visitors, “We embedded the same malformed MP4 file (named mp4.mp4) into an HTML file as below, which is then uploaded to a web server.” researchers say.
Video Demonstration: 'HTML WEBPAGE' Attack Vector
https://youtu.be/xj1hKZ8SeHY
“An attacker would be able to run their code with the same permissions that mediaserver already has as part of its normal routines.”
Here’s one thing you need to know that the previous attack vector required no end-user interaction to exploit the flaw, but the new attack vectors required user interaction to either download the malicious Android app or land the victims on the specially crafted web page.
However, the users can protect themselves from previous MMS attack by turning off MMS auto-retrieval and using 3rd party patched apps to view MMS.
As it’s easy for users to fall for one of the two new attack vectors, the latest attacks cause more severe impact on the targeted Android devices, and also can be used to target large number of audience.
Google has delivered a patch for Stagefright attack but given the shaky history of handset manufacturers and carriers rolling out security patches, it is not known how long the companies will take to update vulnerable Android devices.
Android, Android Vulnerability, hacking android phone, hacking news, how to hack android, multimedia text message, Stagefright
Mobile privacy
Mobile privacy: Tor on the iPhone and other
unusual devices
Marco Bonetti
Abstract
Tor is a software project that helps you defend against traffic analy-
sis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and
privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state se-
curity. Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a
distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world:
it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning
what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning
your physical location.
Unfortunately, with the new features of HTML5 and browser built-
in geolocation being pushed into the Web2.0 world and on mobile
phones and browser, it’s becoming harder and harder to keep the users’
privacy safe. This paper will describe the problems which are arising
around the use of these new technologies and how they can be (ab)used
to attack Tor users. It will also describe where the development is
going to protect mobile phone users privacy and let them survive their
own devices.
i
1 Introduction
Tor is becoming more and more popular, it’s no surprise that TorProject.org
launched this year the ”Help us reach 5000 relay in 2010!” drive [1] [2]. Unfor-
tunately, such growth is not always followed by adoption of secure browsing
behavior and new privacy exploit techniques are always in the development.
If this is not enough, with the rapid growth and diffusion of mobile devices,
it’s becoming really difficult for the end user to protect his very own privacy.
Section 2 will describe the current scenario about secure communication
available for mobile phones. Section 3 will talk about the current availability
of Tor clients for mobile phones and the following chapters will go into details:
Section 4 will describe the working port for the Chumby One multimedia
alarm clock, Section 5 will talk about the Nokia N900 port, Section 6 will
introduce the Android port and, finally, Section 7 will describe my work
in porting Tor for the iPhone platform, how it can improve mobile privacy
communications and which problems arise when using it on such platform.
Finally, Section 8 will talk about what can be done next.
2 Mobile Phones (In)Security
The topic of mobile phones security saw its born in 2008 with the first con-
ferences on the subject and literally exploded in 2009. The reasons behind
this massive growth rely on five factors: phones are considered as something
personal, we bring them everywhere we go. Phones are critical devices: they
collect phone call logs, email and SMS; the addressbook is a precious source
of information, they’re used to store and carry around documents and of-
ten used as access unit to corporate networks. Phones operate in an higly
trusted enviroment, pheraps too much trusted: users trust their phones, they
trust their operator and operators trust themselves both for convenience and
compatibility. Phones communications protocol and networks are closed and
etherogeneus and, finally, the hardware landscapes and software platforms of
phones are fragmented, preventing a common breeding ground for security
development.
These issues have been explored in depth both on the communication side
by the works of Paget and Nohl [3] and on the architectural one by those
of Pietrosanti [4]. Architectural issues are quite interesting: chatting and
texting are predominant operations in the world of a phone, so mobile key-
boards adapted their layout to ease the insertion of common spoken words.
This will generally degrades the strength of a password generated using such
keyboards as numbers and non alphabetical symbols are quite difficult to type
1
into. Screen dimensions also play an important role in such an enviroment:
mobile phones browsers narrow url bar greatly improves phishing attacks,
while checking invalid SSL certificates could be either a really difficult task
or nearly impossible.
When it comes to mobile phones operating system security we can see
too many different implementation strategies, all of them with strengths
and weaknesses. Application permissions are generally configurable, unfor-
tunately, the most common solution is an ”all or nothing” approach, while a
granular permissions fine tuning would be much more safe and interesting.
Finally, on the communication side, there’re still too many unsafe protocol
in use. As we’ve just seen, GSM encryption has been cracked but it’s not the
only protocol who’s suffering: SMS is still being used a lot and, yet, heavily
vulnerable; from sender spoofing to rogue provisioning the Short Messaging
System is not to be considered a secure protocol at all.
When we focus our attention on the privacy side, mobile phones still
shows their young age: we’ve seen how rapid their growth has been, nowadays
phones are full fledged computers, carrying lots of personal data. Only some
of the available operating systems are capable of offering some form of data
encryption [5] [6], for the rest the only choice is to store data in clear.
3 Tor On Mobile Phones And Other Strange
Devices
This year, Tor was ported to a great number of mobile phones and some
strange device also. Everything started in December 2009 with Tor being
run as a bridge on a Chumby One [7], with an official announcement on the
Tor Project blog just some months later, around mid February [8].
Even if it’s an amusing device, the Chumby One is not a mobile phone
at all. The first announcend working port on such devices has been the
Nokia N900 [9] [10] which received a Tor port for the Maemo platform in late
February.
Next, at the beginning of March, came Tor for Android devices [11] [12].
This one has been a real breakthrough: Android is an operating system for
mobile phones with a growing market share, porting the program on such a
platform will surely help Tor diffusion and adoptance.
Implementing the Tor program on mobile phones is not an easy task at
all: the etherogenity of platforms is the first problem to take into account. If
the new hosting platform is following the UNIX standards, then the porting
process will be much more easier than rewriting the code from scratch to
2
adapt the program to the new enviroment. Next problem is the processor
power, even if modern phones can sustain an heavy load of work, keeping the
CPU up with cryptographic functions is a performance and battery killer.
Last, but not least, problem resides in the user interface: as we’ve seen before
in Section 2, the user interface is often narrow and crippled, that’s why such
port of Tor have to adapt their layout in order to fit in small enviroment and
yet be powerful.
4 Tor On The Chumby One
As introduced in Section 3, the Chumby One was the first exotic device to
receive a working port of Tor. Chumby multimedia hubs are hackable Linux
devices, powered by an ARM cpu and 64MB of RAM: they’re an ideal device
for running low-powered and low-bandwidth Tor nodes.
The port has been hacked up by bunnie from bunnie:studios and Jacob
Appelbaum from TorProject. It was announced on 30th December 2009 from
bunnie’s blog [7] but it has only been officially accepted into the Tor source
tree some months later, the 21st February 2010 [8].
This port is very interesting for many aspects: first, it’s quite easy to
install. After installing the Chumby ARM cross toolchain, it’s just a mat-
ter of downloading torproject.org Chumby sources [13] and issuing a ”make”
command inside the source folder. This will produce a zipped build, unpack-
ing it in the root of an USB key and rebooting the Chumby One with such
key inserted will finally install Tor on the device. If a user doesn’t want to
fiddle with the command line and the cross compilers, unpacking one of the
officially provided builds will just be enough to get Tor on the device.
Second, this port is a real working examples on how to port Tor on
hardware with limited resources: the Chumby One has a good processor for
embedded devices and the minimum required amount of RAM to run a Tor
node. Nevertheless, it’s currently able to act as a bridge and providing all
the multimedia entertainment it was designed to without suffering any issues
or slowdown.
There’re also some drawbacks but I’m finding them useful to understand
how such devices can handle a working port of Tor. First one, the installer
will create a swap file for the Chumby One if not already present: this is
needed in case the node will start routing a lot of traffic in order to prevent
the underlying operating system to crash because of the consumption of all
the available RAM.
Second, the Chumby One operating system does not provide an easy to
use updating mechanism for unsupported third party software: Tor upgrades
3
have to rely on the user will to keep the installed program up to date.
Third, the default configuration will set up the node to act as bridge,
listening on port 443. This is an important choice since it will both increase
the number of nodes for helping people stuck inside Tor-hostile networks and
it will prevent the program to eat too many resources too.
Currently the Chumby Tor port is being actively developed and main-
tained, one of the next interesting features has yet been unveiled by bun-
nie:studios: it turns out that an easter egg present in the official firmware
can activate unofficial support for 3G dongles [14], allowing a Chumby device
to route Tor traffic even over the cellular data networks.
5 Tor On Maemo And The Nokia N900
As stated in Section 3, the N900 was the first mobile phone to get a working
port of Tor with a graphical controller application.
The Maemo platform is already providing support for Tor users as a third
party community site [15], the N900 is the choosen platform for developing
a graphical controller application for such operating system.
Installing the Maemo and N900 port is quite easy for this platform too:
the user has just to add the already present, but disabled, Extras-devel repos-
itory to the software manager, looking for Tor in the newly added packages
and reboot the phone. Unfortunately, such repository is marked as ”danger-
ous” even from the Maemo Cummunity site [16], which means the user has
the choice to keep this repo enabled, at the risk of having a non functional
operating system if an upgrade will go wrong, or enabling it just for installing
Tor and subsequent updates which, then, will have to be tracked by hand.
Once installed, the controller application is available from the status
menu: selecting the ”The Onion Router” icon will bring up the configuration
menu where the user can enable or disable the client.
This port is being actively developed but still quite young as the only op-
tion, for now, is the choice of wheter or not activating the client functionality
for the Tor network.
6 Orbot: Tor On Android
Orbot is the latest official TorProject port of Tor for a mobile platform. This
port targets mobile phones shipping with Android firmwares, both for version
1.x and 2.x.
Orbot is not yet available in the Android Market, however its installation
4
is one of the easier seen so far: just by scanning the QR code from the project
page, the user can install the program on his phone [12].
This port is one of the most complete: it ships a copy of Tor, libevent
and privoxy, providing HTTP and SOCKS 4a/5 access to the network. The
controller application can also set lot of different properties, behaving much
like Vidalia [17].
To successfully use the Tor network, Android 1.x users have to download
and install from Android Market the ProxySurf web browser and the Beem
instant messaging applications, while Android 2.x ones can rely on general
system settings. Another option, for both firmwares, is to root the device, in
this case Orbot will automatically transparent proxy all TCP traffic.
Development on this port is going strong but what is still missing is a
trusted secure browser. However, there’s an ongoing effort in porting Mozilla
Fennec over to this operating system [18], this will open the road to a port of
TorButton [19] for the mobile version of Mozilla browser, which could bring
to the community the first secure mobile browser for anonymous communi-
cations.
7 MobileTor: Tor On The iPhone and iPod
Touch Platforms
iPhone and iPod Touch devices are great mobile platforms: they offer quite
good computing power, nice multimedia hardware and a responsive operating
system, all packed in a small, portable form factor [20] [21]. It’s no surprise
that such devices are getting a bigger slice of the growing mobile marketshare.
The growth and diffusions of these products is also due to the availability
of a continuously growing application marketplace known as
App Store
[22]
and an underground, live, development community built around
Cydia
[23]
[24].
Choosing between the official route using the Apple iPhone SDK [25] or
the underground one with the open source development toolchain [26] [27] is
not an easy task: both of them have some pros and cons. When I started
looking into them for developing a port of Tor on the iPhone I had to make
the choice and went down for the open source road. The outcome was in
part forced by the stringent rules for applications submissions to the App
Store which prevents submitting new daemons so, for the initial testing and
development, it was the open source one.
The first port of Tor on the iPhone platform was done by cjacker huang
in December 2007 [28]: he patched the program to have it build and run
5
under first versions of the iPhone firmware together with a working port of
privoxy and he also provided iTor.app, a graphical controller application.
Unfortunately, some time later, he disappered together with iTor.app source
code and binaries: only his patches, accepted and merged into Tor source
tree, survived the event. In February 2010 I began my work from what he
left: I polished his own patches as no more necessaries with the growth of
both firmware versions and Tor code base and I start offering an up to date,
working Tor port for the iPhone again.
My currently working setup includes a Slackware Linux 13.0 64bit open
source toolchain built against iPhone OS version 3.1.2 and a local Tele-
sphoreo [29] checkout. Packages are built following Jay Freeman packaging
conventions for Cydia and hosted at my own online repository available at
http://sid77.slackware.it/iphone/
.
Right now, the first phase of the project is completed: we finally have a
full working port of the command line version of Tor being able to run on
iPhone and iPod Touch devices. The program can both be used as an entry
point for the Tor network, as a traffic relaying node either over wireless or
cellular data networks and as an host for hidden services too.
The second phase of development is going on: even if the port is working
well, it can only be used via an SSH connection from a computer or directly on
the device using MobileTerminal [30]. These solutions are quite inappropriate
for the average user and there’s need for a graphical controller application
for Tor on the iPhone. A first approach is to implement an SBSettings [31]
switch: the user will still have to upload or edit on the device a working
configuration but there will be no more need for the command line interface
in order to start and stop Tor, just a tap on the appropriate icon. Such a
program is ready and soon available in my repository under the name of
Tor
Toggle
. A second, more complete, approach is the writing of a Vidalia-like
[17] application: this is the best solution for controlling and managing the
behavior of Tor on such devices but it’s still under heavy development and
not yet ready for publication.
Even if Tor on the iPhone is growing well, there’re some areas which
still need to be addressed. First of all, there’s lack of a Tor-secure browser:
the iPhone and iPod Touch are currently running Mobile Safari or WebKit
based browsers only, tests need to be run to examine such enviroments and
possibly ensure a secure anonymous browsing experience as much as it will
be allowed by the platform. Another issue is the ability to only set an HTTP
proxy from the wireless preference panel: SOCKS proxy are left out. Even if
this annoyance is easily bypassed by providing a working polipo port, using
Tor as plain SOCKS proxy could have been interesting. Last, the biggest
stopper is the inability to set a proxy for the cellular network: the only way
6
to do so, for now, is to plug the phone in a VPN and then setting a proxy from
there, plain VPN-less cellular data connections can not be proxied yet. All
of these problems are strictly related to the platform and operating system
but they yet impact the adoption of Tor on such mobile devices.
8 Conclusions
On the mobile communications front, Tor has been ported on different, ex-
otic and unusual platforms, such as the Chumby One, the Nokia N900 and
Android-based devices.
My work has been focused in getting Tor running on the iPhone and
iPod touch and it’s currently working very well. What it’s still needed is
a good, secure, browser for anonymous communications on such platforms,
this could be either a result of a good securing work for browsers already
available or a newer one written from scratch. Finally, a graphical controller
application is yet to be written in order to help with adoption and diffusion
of this program.
References
[1] The Tor Project.
https://www.torproject.org/
.
[2] Running a Tor relay.
https://www.torproject.org/docs/
tor-doc-relay.html.en
.
[3] Chris Paget, Karsten Nohl. GSM: SRSLY?
http://events.ccc.de/
congress/2009/Fahrplan/events/3654.en.html
.
[4] Fabio Pietrosanti. Mobile Security.
Security Summit
, 2010.
[5] BlackBerry Help Center. Encryption.
http://docs.blackberry.com/
en/smartphone
users/deliverables/1487/Encryption
34117
11.
jsp
.
[6] BlackBerry Help Center. About content protection.
http:
//docs.blackberry.com/en/smartphone
users/deliverables/
1487/About
content
protection
29009
11.jsp
.
[7] bunnie:studios. Tor Bridge on chumby One.
http://www.
bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=800
.
[8] Jacob Appelbaum. Chumby One and running a bridge.
http://
archives.seul.org/or/talk/Feb-2010/msg00261.html
.
[9] Jacob Appelbaum. Tor on the Nokia N900 (Maemo)
GSM telephone.
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-nokia-n900-maemo-gsm-telephone
.
[10] The Tor Project. Tor: N900 Instructions.
https://www.torproject.
org/docs/N900.html
.[11] Jacob Appelbaum. Tor on Android.https://blog.torproject.org/
blog/tor-android
.
[12] The Tor Project. Tor: Android Instructions.
https://www.
torproject.org/docs/android.html
.
[13] The Tor Project. Chumby Tor sources.
https://svn.torproject.org/
svn/projects/chumby/
.
[14] bunnie:studios. Make Your Own 3G Router.
http://www.
bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=1076
.
[15] Maemo Community. Tor.
http://maemo.org/packages/view/tor/
.
8
[16] Maemo Community. Extras-devel.
http://wiki.maemo.org/
Extras-devel
.
[17] The Tor Project. Vidalia.
http://www.torproject.org/vidalia/
.
[18] Mozilla Wiki. Android.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Android
.
[19] TorButton.
https://www.torproject.org/torbutton/
.
[20] Apple. Apple - iPhone - Technical Specifications.
http://www.apple.
com/iphone/specs.html
.
[21] Apple. Apple - iPod Touch - Technical Specifications for iPod Touch.
http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/specs.html
.
[22] Apple. Apple - iPhone - Download thousand of iPhone applications.
http://www.apple.com/iphone/apps-for-iphone/
.
[23] Jay Freeman (saurik). Cydia.
http://cydia.saurik.com/
.
[24] Jay Freeman (saurik). Bringing Debian APT to the iPhone.
http:
//www.saurik.com/id/1
.
[25] Apple. iPhone SDK.
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/
.
[26] Jay Freeman (saurik). Upgrading the iPhone Toolchain.
http://www.
saurik.com/id/4
.
[27] iphonedevonlinux.
http://code.google.com/p/iphonedevonlinux/
.
[28] cjacker huang. Tor and privoxy had been ported to iphone and works
very well.
http://archives.seul.org/or/dev/Dec-2007/msg00023.
html
.
[29] Jay Freeman (saurik). Telesphoreo Tangelo.
http://www.telesphoreo.
org/
.
[30] Mobile Terminal.
http://code.google.com/p/mobileterminal/
.
[31] BigBoss. The Future of BossPrefs.
http://thebigboss.org/2008/10/
19/the-future-of-bossprefs/
unusual devices
Marco Bonetti
Abstract
Tor is a software project that helps you defend against traffic analy-
sis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and
privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state se-
curity. Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a
distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world:
it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning
what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning
your physical location.
Unfortunately, with the new features of HTML5 and browser built-
in geolocation being pushed into the Web2.0 world and on mobile
phones and browser, it’s becoming harder and harder to keep the users’
privacy safe. This paper will describe the problems which are arising
around the use of these new technologies and how they can be (ab)used
to attack Tor users. It will also describe where the development is
going to protect mobile phone users privacy and let them survive their
own devices.
i
1 Introduction
Tor is becoming more and more popular, it’s no surprise that TorProject.org
launched this year the ”Help us reach 5000 relay in 2010!” drive [1] [2]. Unfor-
tunately, such growth is not always followed by adoption of secure browsing
behavior and new privacy exploit techniques are always in the development.
If this is not enough, with the rapid growth and diffusion of mobile devices,
it’s becoming really difficult for the end user to protect his very own privacy.
Section 2 will describe the current scenario about secure communication
available for mobile phones. Section 3 will talk about the current availability
of Tor clients for mobile phones and the following chapters will go into details:
Section 4 will describe the working port for the Chumby One multimedia
alarm clock, Section 5 will talk about the Nokia N900 port, Section 6 will
introduce the Android port and, finally, Section 7 will describe my work
in porting Tor for the iPhone platform, how it can improve mobile privacy
communications and which problems arise when using it on such platform.
Finally, Section 8 will talk about what can be done next.
2 Mobile Phones (In)Security
The topic of mobile phones security saw its born in 2008 with the first con-
ferences on the subject and literally exploded in 2009. The reasons behind
this massive growth rely on five factors: phones are considered as something
personal, we bring them everywhere we go. Phones are critical devices: they
collect phone call logs, email and SMS; the addressbook is a precious source
of information, they’re used to store and carry around documents and of-
ten used as access unit to corporate networks. Phones operate in an higly
trusted enviroment, pheraps too much trusted: users trust their phones, they
trust their operator and operators trust themselves both for convenience and
compatibility. Phones communications protocol and networks are closed and
etherogeneus and, finally, the hardware landscapes and software platforms of
phones are fragmented, preventing a common breeding ground for security
development.
These issues have been explored in depth both on the communication side
by the works of Paget and Nohl [3] and on the architectural one by those
of Pietrosanti [4]. Architectural issues are quite interesting: chatting and
texting are predominant operations in the world of a phone, so mobile key-
boards adapted their layout to ease the insertion of common spoken words.
This will generally degrades the strength of a password generated using such
keyboards as numbers and non alphabetical symbols are quite difficult to type
1
into. Screen dimensions also play an important role in such an enviroment:
mobile phones browsers narrow url bar greatly improves phishing attacks,
while checking invalid SSL certificates could be either a really difficult task
or nearly impossible.
When it comes to mobile phones operating system security we can see
too many different implementation strategies, all of them with strengths
and weaknesses. Application permissions are generally configurable, unfor-
tunately, the most common solution is an ”all or nothing” approach, while a
granular permissions fine tuning would be much more safe and interesting.
Finally, on the communication side, there’re still too many unsafe protocol
in use. As we’ve just seen, GSM encryption has been cracked but it’s not the
only protocol who’s suffering: SMS is still being used a lot and, yet, heavily
vulnerable; from sender spoofing to rogue provisioning the Short Messaging
System is not to be considered a secure protocol at all.
When we focus our attention on the privacy side, mobile phones still
shows their young age: we’ve seen how rapid their growth has been, nowadays
phones are full fledged computers, carrying lots of personal data. Only some
of the available operating systems are capable of offering some form of data
encryption [5] [6], for the rest the only choice is to store data in clear.
3 Tor On Mobile Phones And Other Strange
Devices
This year, Tor was ported to a great number of mobile phones and some
strange device also. Everything started in December 2009 with Tor being
run as a bridge on a Chumby One [7], with an official announcement on the
Tor Project blog just some months later, around mid February [8].
Even if it’s an amusing device, the Chumby One is not a mobile phone
at all. The first announcend working port on such devices has been the
Nokia N900 [9] [10] which received a Tor port for the Maemo platform in late
February.
Next, at the beginning of March, came Tor for Android devices [11] [12].
This one has been a real breakthrough: Android is an operating system for
mobile phones with a growing market share, porting the program on such a
platform will surely help Tor diffusion and adoptance.
Implementing the Tor program on mobile phones is not an easy task at
all: the etherogenity of platforms is the first problem to take into account. If
the new hosting platform is following the UNIX standards, then the porting
process will be much more easier than rewriting the code from scratch to
2
adapt the program to the new enviroment. Next problem is the processor
power, even if modern phones can sustain an heavy load of work, keeping the
CPU up with cryptographic functions is a performance and battery killer.
Last, but not least, problem resides in the user interface: as we’ve seen before
in Section 2, the user interface is often narrow and crippled, that’s why such
port of Tor have to adapt their layout in order to fit in small enviroment and
yet be powerful.
4 Tor On The Chumby One
As introduced in Section 3, the Chumby One was the first exotic device to
receive a working port of Tor. Chumby multimedia hubs are hackable Linux
devices, powered by an ARM cpu and 64MB of RAM: they’re an ideal device
for running low-powered and low-bandwidth Tor nodes.
The port has been hacked up by bunnie from bunnie:studios and Jacob
Appelbaum from TorProject. It was announced on 30th December 2009 from
bunnie’s blog [7] but it has only been officially accepted into the Tor source
tree some months later, the 21st February 2010 [8].
This port is very interesting for many aspects: first, it’s quite easy to
install. After installing the Chumby ARM cross toolchain, it’s just a mat-
ter of downloading torproject.org Chumby sources [13] and issuing a ”make”
command inside the source folder. This will produce a zipped build, unpack-
ing it in the root of an USB key and rebooting the Chumby One with such
key inserted will finally install Tor on the device. If a user doesn’t want to
fiddle with the command line and the cross compilers, unpacking one of the
officially provided builds will just be enough to get Tor on the device.
Second, this port is a real working examples on how to port Tor on
hardware with limited resources: the Chumby One has a good processor for
embedded devices and the minimum required amount of RAM to run a Tor
node. Nevertheless, it’s currently able to act as a bridge and providing all
the multimedia entertainment it was designed to without suffering any issues
or slowdown.
There’re also some drawbacks but I’m finding them useful to understand
how such devices can handle a working port of Tor. First one, the installer
will create a swap file for the Chumby One if not already present: this is
needed in case the node will start routing a lot of traffic in order to prevent
the underlying operating system to crash because of the consumption of all
the available RAM.
Second, the Chumby One operating system does not provide an easy to
use updating mechanism for unsupported third party software: Tor upgrades
3
have to rely on the user will to keep the installed program up to date.
Third, the default configuration will set up the node to act as bridge,
listening on port 443. This is an important choice since it will both increase
the number of nodes for helping people stuck inside Tor-hostile networks and
it will prevent the program to eat too many resources too.
Currently the Chumby Tor port is being actively developed and main-
tained, one of the next interesting features has yet been unveiled by bun-
nie:studios: it turns out that an easter egg present in the official firmware
can activate unofficial support for 3G dongles [14], allowing a Chumby device
to route Tor traffic even over the cellular data networks.
5 Tor On Maemo And The Nokia N900
As stated in Section 3, the N900 was the first mobile phone to get a working
port of Tor with a graphical controller application.
The Maemo platform is already providing support for Tor users as a third
party community site [15], the N900 is the choosen platform for developing
a graphical controller application for such operating system.
Installing the Maemo and N900 port is quite easy for this platform too:
the user has just to add the already present, but disabled, Extras-devel repos-
itory to the software manager, looking for Tor in the newly added packages
and reboot the phone. Unfortunately, such repository is marked as ”danger-
ous” even from the Maemo Cummunity site [16], which means the user has
the choice to keep this repo enabled, at the risk of having a non functional
operating system if an upgrade will go wrong, or enabling it just for installing
Tor and subsequent updates which, then, will have to be tracked by hand.
Once installed, the controller application is available from the status
menu: selecting the ”The Onion Router” icon will bring up the configuration
menu where the user can enable or disable the client.
This port is being actively developed but still quite young as the only op-
tion, for now, is the choice of wheter or not activating the client functionality
for the Tor network.
6 Orbot: Tor On Android
Orbot is the latest official TorProject port of Tor for a mobile platform. This
port targets mobile phones shipping with Android firmwares, both for version
1.x and 2.x.
Orbot is not yet available in the Android Market, however its installation
4
is one of the easier seen so far: just by scanning the QR code from the project
page, the user can install the program on his phone [12].
This port is one of the most complete: it ships a copy of Tor, libevent
and privoxy, providing HTTP and SOCKS 4a/5 access to the network. The
controller application can also set lot of different properties, behaving much
like Vidalia [17].
To successfully use the Tor network, Android 1.x users have to download
and install from Android Market the ProxySurf web browser and the Beem
instant messaging applications, while Android 2.x ones can rely on general
system settings. Another option, for both firmwares, is to root the device, in
this case Orbot will automatically transparent proxy all TCP traffic.
Development on this port is going strong but what is still missing is a
trusted secure browser. However, there’s an ongoing effort in porting Mozilla
Fennec over to this operating system [18], this will open the road to a port of
TorButton [19] for the mobile version of Mozilla browser, which could bring
to the community the first secure mobile browser for anonymous communi-
cations.
7 MobileTor: Tor On The iPhone and iPod
Touch Platforms
iPhone and iPod Touch devices are great mobile platforms: they offer quite
good computing power, nice multimedia hardware and a responsive operating
system, all packed in a small, portable form factor [20] [21]. It’s no surprise
that such devices are getting a bigger slice of the growing mobile marketshare.
The growth and diffusions of these products is also due to the availability
of a continuously growing application marketplace known as
App Store
[22]
and an underground, live, development community built around
Cydia
[23]
[24].
Choosing between the official route using the Apple iPhone SDK [25] or
the underground one with the open source development toolchain [26] [27] is
not an easy task: both of them have some pros and cons. When I started
looking into them for developing a port of Tor on the iPhone I had to make
the choice and went down for the open source road. The outcome was in
part forced by the stringent rules for applications submissions to the App
Store which prevents submitting new daemons so, for the initial testing and
development, it was the open source one.
The first port of Tor on the iPhone platform was done by cjacker huang
in December 2007 [28]: he patched the program to have it build and run
5
under first versions of the iPhone firmware together with a working port of
privoxy and he also provided iTor.app, a graphical controller application.
Unfortunately, some time later, he disappered together with iTor.app source
code and binaries: only his patches, accepted and merged into Tor source
tree, survived the event. In February 2010 I began my work from what he
left: I polished his own patches as no more necessaries with the growth of
both firmware versions and Tor code base and I start offering an up to date,
working Tor port for the iPhone again.
My currently working setup includes a Slackware Linux 13.0 64bit open
source toolchain built against iPhone OS version 3.1.2 and a local Tele-
sphoreo [29] checkout. Packages are built following Jay Freeman packaging
conventions for Cydia and hosted at my own online repository available at
http://sid77.slackware.it/iphone/
.
Right now, the first phase of the project is completed: we finally have a
full working port of the command line version of Tor being able to run on
iPhone and iPod Touch devices. The program can both be used as an entry
point for the Tor network, as a traffic relaying node either over wireless or
cellular data networks and as an host for hidden services too.
The second phase of development is going on: even if the port is working
well, it can only be used via an SSH connection from a computer or directly on
the device using MobileTerminal [30]. These solutions are quite inappropriate
for the average user and there’s need for a graphical controller application
for Tor on the iPhone. A first approach is to implement an SBSettings [31]
switch: the user will still have to upload or edit on the device a working
configuration but there will be no more need for the command line interface
in order to start and stop Tor, just a tap on the appropriate icon. Such a
program is ready and soon available in my repository under the name of
Tor
Toggle
. A second, more complete, approach is the writing of a Vidalia-like
[17] application: this is the best solution for controlling and managing the
behavior of Tor on such devices but it’s still under heavy development and
not yet ready for publication.
Even if Tor on the iPhone is growing well, there’re some areas which
still need to be addressed. First of all, there’s lack of a Tor-secure browser:
the iPhone and iPod Touch are currently running Mobile Safari or WebKit
based browsers only, tests need to be run to examine such enviroments and
possibly ensure a secure anonymous browsing experience as much as it will
be allowed by the platform. Another issue is the ability to only set an HTTP
proxy from the wireless preference panel: SOCKS proxy are left out. Even if
this annoyance is easily bypassed by providing a working polipo port, using
Tor as plain SOCKS proxy could have been interesting. Last, the biggest
stopper is the inability to set a proxy for the cellular network: the only way
6
to do so, for now, is to plug the phone in a VPN and then setting a proxy from
there, plain VPN-less cellular data connections can not be proxied yet. All
of these problems are strictly related to the platform and operating system
but they yet impact the adoption of Tor on such mobile devices.
8 Conclusions
On the mobile communications front, Tor has been ported on different, ex-
otic and unusual platforms, such as the Chumby One, the Nokia N900 and
Android-based devices.
My work has been focused in getting Tor running on the iPhone and
iPod touch and it’s currently working very well. What it’s still needed is
a good, secure, browser for anonymous communications on such platforms,
this could be either a result of a good securing work for browsers already
available or a newer one written from scratch. Finally, a graphical controller
application is yet to be written in order to help with adoption and diffusion
of this program.
References
[1] The Tor Project.
https://www.torproject.org/
.
[2] Running a Tor relay.
https://www.torproject.org/docs/
tor-doc-relay.html.en
.
[3] Chris Paget, Karsten Nohl. GSM: SRSLY?
http://events.ccc.de/
congress/2009/Fahrplan/events/3654.en.html
.
[4] Fabio Pietrosanti. Mobile Security.
Security Summit
, 2010.
[5] BlackBerry Help Center. Encryption.
http://docs.blackberry.com/
en/smartphone
users/deliverables/1487/Encryption
34117
11.
jsp
.
[6] BlackBerry Help Center. About content protection.
http:
//docs.blackberry.com/en/smartphone
users/deliverables/
1487/About
content
protection
29009
11.jsp
.
[7] bunnie:studios. Tor Bridge on chumby One.
http://www.
bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=800
.
[8] Jacob Appelbaum. Chumby One and running a bridge.
http://
archives.seul.org/or/talk/Feb-2010/msg00261.html
.
[9] Jacob Appelbaum. Tor on the Nokia N900 (Maemo)
GSM telephone.
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-nokia-n900-maemo-gsm-telephone
.
[10] The Tor Project. Tor: N900 Instructions.
https://www.torproject.
org/docs/N900.html
.[11] Jacob Appelbaum. Tor on Android.https://blog.torproject.org/
blog/tor-android
.
[12] The Tor Project. Tor: Android Instructions.
https://www.
torproject.org/docs/android.html
.
[13] The Tor Project. Chumby Tor sources.
https://svn.torproject.org/
svn/projects/chumby/
.
[14] bunnie:studios. Make Your Own 3G Router.
http://www.
bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=1076
.
[15] Maemo Community. Tor.
http://maemo.org/packages/view/tor/
.
8
[16] Maemo Community. Extras-devel.
http://wiki.maemo.org/
Extras-devel
.
[17] The Tor Project. Vidalia.
http://www.torproject.org/vidalia/
.
[18] Mozilla Wiki. Android.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Android
.
[19] TorButton.
https://www.torproject.org/torbutton/
.
[20] Apple. Apple - iPhone - Technical Specifications.
http://www.apple.
com/iphone/specs.html
.
[21] Apple. Apple - iPod Touch - Technical Specifications for iPod Touch.
http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/specs.html
.
[22] Apple. Apple - iPhone - Download thousand of iPhone applications.
http://www.apple.com/iphone/apps-for-iphone/
.
[23] Jay Freeman (saurik). Cydia.
http://cydia.saurik.com/
.
[24] Jay Freeman (saurik). Bringing Debian APT to the iPhone.
http:
//www.saurik.com/id/1
.
[25] Apple. iPhone SDK.
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/
.
[26] Jay Freeman (saurik). Upgrading the iPhone Toolchain.
http://www.
saurik.com/id/4
.
[27] iphonedevonlinux.
http://code.google.com/p/iphonedevonlinux/
.
[28] cjacker huang. Tor and privoxy had been ported to iphone and works
very well.
http://archives.seul.org/or/dev/Dec-2007/msg00023.
html
.
[29] Jay Freeman (saurik). Telesphoreo Tangelo.
http://www.telesphoreo.
org/
.
[30] Mobile Terminal.
http://code.google.com/p/mobileterminal/
.
[31] BigBoss. The Future of BossPrefs.
http://thebigboss.org/2008/10/
19/the-future-of-bossprefs/
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
BARNABY JACK
Barnaby Jack
Barnaby Jack, born November 22 1977, died July 25 2013
In 2008 Jack bought two ATMs, of the kind seen in bars and shops, over the internet for $2,000 each, and had them delivered to his apartment in San Jose, California. The New Zealand-born computer engineer later recalled: “So the guy, he wheels in this ATM, and he’s like, 'Why on earth do you need an ATM in your house?’ And I’m like, 'Oh, I just don’t like the transaction fees, mate.’”
For the next two years he analysed their software codes, believing that there were inherent weaknesses that would allow the machines to be controlled through the internet.
Eventually Jack succeeded in bypassing the demands for passwords and serial numbers, and was able to access his ATMs remotely. He could then withdraw all their cash – a process that became known as “Jackpotting”. He could also access information about bank accounts from the magnetic strips on bank and credit cards, and steal ATM users’ passwords.
At the Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas in July 2010, Jack demonstrated all this live on stage, showing how he could connect to an ATM via a telephone modem and, without using a password, withdraw all the machine’s cash.
As director of security testing at the Seattle-based computer security consultants IOActive, Jack’s purpose was to alert the manufacturers to potential failures in their systems. In an interview with CNN after the conference he said: “We were really careful when we gave this demonstration to make sure that the vendors had mitigation remediation in place before we went up and did it. I mean, the goal at Black Hat was certainly not to give a cookbook recipe for everyone out there to be able to go and loot ATMs. So we made sure the vendors had fixes in place.
“I demonstrated two different attacks. One was a walk-up attack, where I would literally walk up to an ATM, [and] within about two minutes it would just start spitting out its entire dispenser. Of course you had to be at the ATM for that one to work. The other attack was completely remote, so I could do it from a laptop in a hotel room or your bedroom... But I also had it harvesting people’s credit cards and pin numbers, which I could then retrieve remotely as well. It was 100 per cent anonymous, and bypassing all authentication.”
Jack was concerned that, when it came to ATMs, too much emphasis was placed on the “physical” defences, such as whether the machine was bolted down, or whether there was CCTV. “This is the first time anyone had actually looked at the underlying software,” he claimed. “And once I sort of dug in, ripped the software apart, I was really surprised at the amount of flaws that are hiding underneath there.” He added: “I am not naive enough to think I am the only one who can do it.”
Barnaby Michael Douglas Jack was born in Auckland, New Zealand, on November 22 1977, the son of Michael and Sammi Jack, and was fascinated by computers from boyhood.
Jack made his career in the United States, and from the age of 21 worked as a research engineer in the computer security software business, at Network Associates, Foundstone and eEye Digital Security. In 2006 he moved to Juniper Networks, and in June 2010 joined IOActive as director of research. At the time of his death he was director of embedded device security.
He died only a week before he was due to demonstrate at a conference how an assassin might kill his victim by disabling an implanted pacemaker or defibrillator from 30ft away – an idea used in the television series Homeland, starring Damian Lewis and Claire Danes.
In June this year Jack said: “Malware will often slow down a computer, and when you slow down a medical device it no longer gives the integrity needed to perform as it should.” He considered the Homeland scenario “fairly realistic” – although “they required a serial number, my demonstration does not”.
At a recent conference in Melbourne, Jack had delivered an 830-volt jolt to a pacemaker by logging into it remotely. Many medical devices use wireless technology, and authorisation that requires only a user name and password that can be remotely extracted from them. Jack said these were designed to be easy to crack by a doctor needing to give treatment in an emergency.
Jack even suggested that it would be possible to write a “worm” for a particular brand of pacemaker or defibrillator, then spread it to other devices within range, from one person to another.
Barnaby Jack was found dead at his apartment in San Francisco; the cause of death is unknown.
He is survived by his mother, his sister, Amberleigh, and by his girlfriend, Layne Cross.
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