Hack a Day » thelasthope

HOPE 2008: YouTomb, A free culture hack

Eliot — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:10:00 +0000

YouTomb is a research project designed by the MIT Free Culture group to track video take downs on YouTube. To succeed, the team needed to track every single video on YouTube… which is close to impossible. Instead, they built several “explorer” scripts to track what videos were interesting. One explorer tracks all of YouTube’s lists: recommended, featured, most active, and more. Another explorer picks up every video submitted to YouTube, and a third crawls Technorati.

The explorers just find the videos; a separate group of scanner scripts checks the current status of videos. It checks both the new videos and ones that have been killed to see if they return. YouTomb archives every video it finds. They display the thumbnail of the video under fair use, but they’re still determining whether they can display each video in full.

YouTomb is tracking a little more than 282,000 videos right now and maintain a public MySQL snapshot for anyone that wants to build their own tools. The code is also open source. They’ve been archiving all their historical data too, all 70 million rows of it.

They’ve started trending country censorship. Germany, Poland, and France all have hate speech bans, so any video with a swastika can’t be viewed there. Thailand blocks anything that impugns the king. Crank That is blocked in 200+ countries.

YouTomb got a lot of press when it was initially released. The team feels that this is the result of a clear interface. They encourage others to take the time to present data clearly. As a final note, they pointed out that you can always file a DMCA counterclaim to get your videos restored.

HOPE 2008: Methods of Copying High Security Keys

Eliot — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:15:00 +0000

[Barry Wels] is well known for his lockpicking talks, but this year he wanted to talk about how he copies high security keys. If a key blank is available, you could make a copy just by viewing the original. High security keys generally have profiles with more side cuts, which means you can guess at how deep a specific pin is by observing how many cuts it crosses. He also showed that you could imprint your arm with the key and use that as a guide. If a blank isn’t available, you could fill a similar key with solder and file that down.

[Barry] showed two different kits for casting keys. The first used soft clay in a clam shell to make an imprint of the original key. The form is then filled with a low melting point alloy (probably Wood’s metal) to create the new key. A second style uses a metal form and two part silicone to create the mold. This method works for most high security keys, but will not work on keys with active elements like sliders or magnets.

Finally, [Barry] talked about his favorite method: impressioning. Unlike picking a lock, when you’re done impressioning you have a funtional key. You start with key blank and file off the top layer. Place the blank in the lock and turn it till it jams. Then, you rock the key up and down. Observing the key under light you’ll see a small mark where each pin is. File a bit where the marks appear and repeat the process. You can’t use too much force or you might break the blank. This also works on dimple keys and as this video shows, laser cut keys. [Barry] highly recommends the impressioning book by [Oliver Diederichsen].

[photo: Rija 2.0]

The Next HOPE announced

Eliot — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Against all previous indications-including being called The Last HOPE-the conference will not only be returning in 2010, it will be at the Hotel Pennsylvania. We’re looking forward to The Next HOPE, which will probably followed by The Last HYPE, which in turn will be followed by: We’re Super Serious This Is The Last HOPE.

HOPE 2008: Community Fabrication

Eliot — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 00:10:00 +0000

Today at The Last HOPE, [Far McKon] from Philadelphia’s Hacktory presented on community fabrication. Over the last few years we’ve seen a lot of different accessible rapid prototyping machines created. There’s the RepRap, a fabrication machine that has achieved self replication; our friends at Metalab have gotten their own version of the machine running too. The Hacktory has recently acquired a Fab@home machine. Fab@home hopes to make manufacturing using multiple materials accessible to home users. Multiple materials means people have constructed objects that vary from embedded circuits to hors d’oeuvres. We can’t talk about edible prototyping without bringing up the CandyFab machine, which fuses sugar. The Hacktory has enjoyed their machine so far, but have found the learning curve fairly difficult. While it’s great to see the cost of rapid prototyping dropping, we’ll be much happier when the ease of use improves.

HOPE 2008: Wikiscanner 2.0

Eliot — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 02:50:00 +0000

[Virgil] presented the next version of Wikiscanner at The Last HOPE today. To build the original Wikiscanner, he scanned the monthly database dump of anonymous edits and compared that against a purchased list of known company IP addresses. The 34.5 million edits account for nearly 21% of all edits. The idea was to unearth businesses and groups white washing critical pages. This only handles anonymous edits though. Users could log in to avoid having their IP reversed.

In the new version, [Virgil]‘s team developed a Poor Man’s CheckUser. If you spend too much time editing a talk page, your session could end and when you hit save it attaches your IP. Most regular users will then log in and remove their IP. They found 13,000 username/IP address pairs by searching for IPs being removed and replaced with usernames. These are some of the most active users. Using this list, they could potentially uncover sockpuppets or potential collusion by top editors.

Another update to the Wikiscanner is based on the trademark database. In 2.0, companies are now associated with edits to their respective products. Link distance is also taken into account. So, pages that link to a corporation page are also tracked.

As part of a joke, [Virgil] compared a list of IP addresses that were specific to each MIT building. You can see exactly which building was editing the “tentacle rape” page. No, really, that’s a real example.

Finally, [Virgil] showed some wiki tools that others have built: a tool for building graphs from arbitrary data, a tool that shows the age of text for credibility, and another that does an overview of all page edits.

HOPE 2008: Cold boot attack tools released

Eliot — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 01:45:00 +0000

The team from Princeton has released their cold boot attack tools at The Last HOPE. Earlier this year they showed how to recover crypto keys from the memory of a machine that had been powered off. Now they’ve provided the tools necessary to acquire and play around with your own memory dumps. The bios_memimage tool is written in C and uses PXE to boot the machine and copy the memory. The package also has a disk boot dumper with instructions for how to run it on an iPod. There’s also efi_memimage which implements the BSD TCP/IP stack in EFI, but it can be problematic. aeskeyfind can recover 128 and 256bit AES keys from the memory dumps and rsakeyfind does the same for RSA. They’ve also provided aesfix to correct up to 15% of a key. In testing, they only ever saw 0.1% error in there memory dumps and 0.01% if they cooled the chips first.

We saw another interesting tool today: coreinfo is a library for the custom BIOS coreboot. Using it you can examine the memory directly without any damage.

The Q&A session at the end of [Jacob Appelbaum]‘s talk included a discussion of possible countermeasures. We’re convinced that this won’t be solved until there’s a fundamental change to RAM design. One of the interesting suggestions we heard was building a “RAM condom”. It would be a riser card that the RAM plugs into. When the case intrusion system triggered it would blank the RAM. It’s an interesting idea; anyone want to build it?

HOPE 2008: The impossibility of hardware obfuscation

Eliot — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 21:20:00 +0000

The Last HOPE is off and running in NYC. [Karsten Nohl] started the day by presenting The (Im)possibility of Hardware Obfuscation. [Karsten] is well versed in this subject having worked on a team that the broke the MiFare crypto1 RFID chip. The algorithm used is proprietary so part of their investigation was looking directly at the hardware. As [bunnie] mentioned in his Toorcon silicon hacking talk, silicon is hard to design even before considering security, it must obey the laws of physics (everything the hardware does has to be physically built), and in the manufacturing process the chip is reverse engineered to verify it. All of these elements make it very interesting for hackers. For the MiFare crack, they shaved off layers of silicon and photographed them. Using Matlab they visually identified the various gates and looked for crypto like parts. If you’re interested in what these logic cells look like, [Karsten] has assembled The Silicon Zoo. The Zoo has pictures of standard cells like inverters, buffers, latches, flip-flops, etc. Have a look at [Chris Tarnovsky]‘s work to learn about how he processes smart cards or [nico]‘s guide to exposing standard chips we covered earlier in the week.

Music and visual arts at The Last HOPE

Benjamin Eckel — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 03:40:00 +0000

[Peter Kirn] from Create Digital Music has an article up highlighting many of the great music and visual performance pieces planned for The Last HOPE on Friday night. If you are around New York and not accustomed to hacking conferences, this could be a great excuse to go check it out. Here are some of our favorite projects.

In the field of visuals, [Joshue Ott] and [Ezekiel Honig] are scheduled for an exhibition. [Ott] is best known for authoring superDraw, an amazing app used for generating visuals for music. The above video shows superDraw in action. [Honig] will provide his usual brand of warm and noisy ambient soundscapes.

Representing the 8-bit scene, [Paris] (video above) and [No Carrier] are also scheduled to attend.

[Michael Una] will also be on hand to showcase his live looping and robot assisted performances. The above video shows one of the robots he will be performing with. This robot was built around the Highly Liquid MIDI kit.

The Last Hope schedule finalized, preregister now

Eliot — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:50:00 +0000

The schedule for this year’s The Last Hope conference in New York City has been finalized, and there’s still time to preregister. Today is the last chance for overseas attendants to preregister, and the rest of you have until July 6th. A/V volunteers are still needed, so step up if you have the desire and skills.

The three-day conference will feature three tracks of scheduled talks, plus one track for unscheduled talks by registered attendees. You can view the full schedule interactively, in wiki format, or in conventional format. It takes place between July 18th and July 20th; hurry up and snag your tickets now. We’re interested in all the talks, but [Chris Seidel]‘s talk on biohacking, NYC Resistor’s presentation about collaborative hardware hacking, and [Ray]‘s demonstration on escaping high security handcuffs have us waiting in rapt anticipation. So who’s going? What are you looking forward to? Let us know in the comments.

The Last HOPE full speaker list released

Eliot — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 01:20:00 +0000

The Last HOPE has just released a list of all the schedule talks at the conference. 97 different talks will be divided over three tracks during the course of the three day conference. It looks like a lot of interesting events will be going down. The Cold Boot encryption attack tools will be released. Representatives from Graffiti Research Lab will be showing The Complete First Season and unveiling their One Laser Tag Per Child system. Virgil Griffith from WikiScanner will be mining even deeper into the wretched hive of scum and villainy. Karsten Nohl will present why hardware obfuscation is an impossibility and how they defeated the MiFare crypto. The Last HOPE will be in New York City July 18-20, 2008

Upcoming convention roundup

Sean Percival — Sat, 31 May 2008 03:00:00 +0000

Lots of con news is coming in these days so lets do a quick roundup of upcoming events:

REcon
June 13-15, 2008
Montreal, Canada

REcon has started posting information about their training sessions such as the Advanced Reverse Engineering session with Nicolas Brulez.

The Last HOPE
July 18-20, 2008
New York City

The Last HOPE just announced its speaker list. It includes the infamous Kevin Mitnick, Mythbusters co-host Adam Savage, and author Steven Levy to name a few.

DEFCON 16
August 8-10, 2008
Las Vegas

The DEFCON team also released the first batch of speakers for this year’s convention. Qualification starts tonight at 10PM EST for the capture the flag (CTF) contest so be sure to get registered. Check the txt for more information. We recently talked about the beverage cooling contraption contest, but you can find many other contests on the forums.

Upcoming events

Eliot — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 19:00:00 +0000

We’re headed to Cleveland at the end of the week (we’ve heard rumors it rocks) and thought it would be good to list the events we’re planning on hitting in the next five months.

Notacon / Blockparty April 4-6 Cleveland, OH – This will be a first for us, but we’re definitely excited, especially for the demoscene madness at Blockparty (like Trixter’s MONOTONE PC speaker tracker).
ToorCon Seattle April 18-20 Seattle, WA – In its second year, this small gathering is sure to be a blast just like last year.
The Last HOPE July 18-20 New York, NY – Our first HOPE and the last one ever.. since the hotel is being torn down.
Black Hat US August 2-7 Las Vegas, NV – If anything gets released this year, it’ll be here.
DefCon August 8-10 Las Vegas, NV – The first con we ever went to. It’s not the best con, but it’s always interesting.
SIGGRAPH August 11-15 Los Angeles, CA – SIGGRAPH is where you need to be if you want to see cutting edge graphics and interaction projects. It’s a favorite of ours and a nice break from computer security.

Anything we’re missing?

UPDATE: Maker Faire May 3-4 San Mateo, CA – Can’t believe we forgot it. Thanks [pt]!