Access The Information Superhighway With A Mac Plus

October 17, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 5 Comments

For some time now, Apple has developed a reputation for manufacturing computers and phones that are not particularly repairable or upgradable. While this reputation is somewhat deserved, especially in recent years, it seems less true for their older machines. With the second and perhaps most influential computer, the Apple II, being so upgradable that the machine had a production run of nearly two decades. Similarly, the Macintosh Plus of 1986 was surprisingly upgradable and repairable and [Hunter] demonstrates its capabilities by bringing one onto the modern Internet, albeit with a few tricks to adapt the old hardware and software to the modern era.

The Mac Plus was salvaged from a thrift store, and the first issue to solve was that it had some rotten capacitors that had to be replaced before the computer could be reliably powered on at all. [Hunter] then got to work bringing this computer online, with the only major hardware modification being a BlueSCSI hard drive emulator which allows using an SD card instead of an original hard disk. It can also emulate an original Macintosh Ethernet card, allowing it to fairly easily get online.

The original operating system and browser don’t support modern protocols such as HTTPS or scripting languages like Javascript or CSS, so a tool called MacProxy was used to bridge this gap. It serves simplified HTML from the Internet to the Mac Plus, but [Hunter] wanted it to work even better, adding modular domain-specific handling to allow the computer to more easily access sites like Reddit, YouTube, and even Hackaday, although he does call us out a bit for not maintaining our retro page perhaps as well as it ought to be.

[Hunter] has also built an extension to use the Wayback Machine to serve websites to the Mac from a specific date in the past, which really enhances the retro feel of using a computer like this to access the Internet. Of course, if you don’t have original Macintosh hardware but still want to have the same experience of the early Internet or retro hardware this replica Mac will get you there too.

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Modeling Network Latency

January 17, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 6 Comments

The selfhosting community is an interesting and useful part of the Internet dedicated to removing one’s own services and data from the cloud and hosting it on their own servers, often on hardware that can be physically touched. With that kind of network usage, it’s not uncommon for people to build their own routers, firewalls, and other network support systems from the ground up. And, if you go deep enough, maybe even a home lab dedicated to testing and improving the network’s various layers. This piece of software helps simulate network latency to more accurately assess quality of service, performance, and the optimization of one one’s own networks.

The tool, called Speedbump, allows a network administer to quickly build a test network where characteristics of the network such as base latency and wave shape and size can be set up. From there, a TCP proxy sends the network traffic through the virtual network, adding in a set amount of delay to anything traveling on the network. It can be installed (or built from source) on an existing installation or used from within a Docker terminal, so there are plenty of options depending on preference. It’s also available as a library for any programs written in Go.

While this certainly has applications for home labs where self-hosting services is done at a high level, this could have professional applications as well. For troubleshooting simpler network issues we’d always recommend this tool which allows a more comprehensive network test than the standard “ping” command, and if you haven’t heard of selfhosting before it’s probably time to read this primer on it and build a hobby web server from scratch.

“Borrow” Payment Cards With NFC Proxy Hardware

July 31, 2017 by Mike Szczys 31 Comments

Contactless payments are growing in popularity. Often the term will bring to mind the ability to pay by holding your phone over a reader, but the system can also use NFC tags embedded in credit cards, ID card, passports, and the like. NFC is a reasonably secure method of validating payments as it employs encryption and the functional distance between client and reader is in the tens of centimeters, and often much less. [Haoqi Shan] and the Unicorn team have reduced the security of the distance component by using a hardware proxy to relay NFC interactions over longer distances.

The talk, give on Sunday at DEF CON, outlined some incredibly simple hardware: an NFC antenna connected to a PN7462AU, an NRF24L01 wireless transceiver, and some power regulation. The exploit works by using a pair of these hardware modules. A master interfaces with the NFC reader, and a slave reads the card. The scenario goes something like this: a victim NFC card is placed near the slave hardware. The master hardware is placed over a payment kiosk as if making a normal payment. As the payment kiosk reader begins the process to read an NFC card, all of the communications between it and the actual card are forwarded over the 24L01 wireless connection.

The demo video during the talk showed a fast-food purchase made on the Apple Pay network while the card was still at a table out in the dining area (resting on the slave hardware module). The card used was a QuickPass contactless payment card from China UnionPay. According to a 2016 press release from the company, over two billion of these cards had been issued at the time. With that kind of adoption rate there is a huge incentive to find and patch any vulnerabilities in the system.

The hardware components in this build aren’t really anything special. We’ve seen these Nordic wireless modules used in numerous projects over they years, and the NXP chip is just NFC build around an ARM core. The leaps that tie this together are the speed-ups to make it work. NFC has tight timing and a delay between the master and slave would invalidate the handshake and subsequent interactions. The Unicorn team found some speedups by ensuring the chip was waking from suspend mode (150 µS) and not a deeper sleep. Furthermore, [Haoqi] mentioned they are only transmitting “I/S/R Block Data” and not the entirety of the interaction to save on time transmitting over the 24L01 wireless link. He didn’t expand on that so if you have details about what those blocks actually consist of please let us know in the comments below.

To the card reader, the emulated payment card is valid and the payment goes through. But one caveat to the system is that [Haoqi] was unable to alter the UID of the emulator — it doesn’t spoof the UID of the payment card being exploited. Current readers don’t check the UID and this could be one possible defense against this exploit. But to be honest, since you need close physical proximity of the master to the reader and the slave to the payment card simultaneously, we don’t see mayhem in the future. It’s more likely that we’ll see hacker cred when someone builds a long-range link that lets you leave your NFC cards at home and take one emulator with you for wireless door access or contactless payments in a single device. If you want to get working on this, check out the talk slides for program flow and some sourcecode hints.

A Red Teamer’s Guide To Pivoting

March 25, 2017 by Elliot Williams 22 Comments

What is hacking and what is network engineering? We’re not sure where exactly to draw the lines, but [Artem]’s writeup of pivoting is distinctly written from the (paid) hacker’s perspective.

Once you’re inside a network, the question is what to do next. “Pivoting” is how you get from where you are currently to where you want to be, or even just find out what’s available. And that means using all of the networking tricks available. These aren’t just useful for breaking into other people’s networks, though. We’ve used half of these tools at one time or another just running things at home. The other half? Getting to know them would make a rainy-day project.

Is there anything that ssh and socat can’t do? Maybe not, but there are other tools (3proxy and Rpivot) that will let you do it easier. You know how clients behind a NAT firewall can reach out, but can’t be reached from outside? ssh -D will forward a port to the inside of the network. Need to get data out? There’s the old standby iodine to route arbitrary data over DNS queries, but [Artem] says dnscat2 works without root permissions. (And this code does the same on an ESP8266.)

Once you’ve set up proxies inside, the tremendously useful proxychains will let you tunnel whatever you’d like across them. Python’s pty shell makes things easier to use, and tsh will get you a small shell on the inside, complete with file-transfer capabilities.

Again, this writeup is geared toward the pen-testing professional, but you might find any one of these tools useful in your own home network. We used to stream MP3s from home to work with some (ab)use of netcat and ssh. We keep our home IoT devices inside our own network, and launching reverse-proxies lets us check up on things from far away without permanently leaving the doors open. One hacker’s encrypted tunnel is another man’s VPN. Once you know the tools, you’ll find plenty of uses for them. What’s your favorite?

Thanks [nootrope] for the indirect tip!

Stumbling Upon An Uber Vulnerability

February 27, 2015 by Rick Osgood 30 Comments

[Nathan] is a mobile application developer. He was recently debugging one of his new applications when he stumbled into an interesting security vulnerability while running a program called Charles. Charles is a web proxy that allows you to monitor and analyze the web traffic between your computer and the Internet. The program essentially acts as a man in the middle, allowing you to view all of the request and response data and usually giving you the ability to manipulate it.

While debugging his app, [Nathan] realized he was going to need a ride soon. After opening up the Uber app, he it occurred to him that he was still inspecting this traffic. He decided to poke around and see if he could find anything interesting. Communication from the Uber app to the Uber data center is done via HTTPS. This means that it’s encrypted to protect your information. However, if you are trying to inspect your own traffic you can use Charles to sign your own SSL certificate and decrypt all the information. That’s exactly what [Nathan] did. He doesn’t mention it in his blog post, but we have to wonder if the Uber app warned him of the invalid SSL certificate. If not, this could pose a privacy issue for other users if someone were to perform a man in the middle attack on an unsuspecting victim.

[Nathan] poked around the various requests until he saw something intriguing. There was one repeated request that is used by Uber to “receive and communicate rider location, driver availability, application configurations settings and more”. He noticed that within this request, there is a variable called “isAdmin” and it was set to false. [Nathan] used Charles to intercept this request and change the value to true. He wasn’t sure that it would do anything, but sure enough this unlocked some new features normally only accessible to Uber employees. We’re not exactly sure what these features are good for, but obviously they aren’t meant to be used by just anybody.

Raspberry Pi Tor Proxy Lets You Take Anonymity With You

June 15, 2013 by Mike Szczys 41 Comments

pi-tor-proxy

Your web traffic is being logged at many different levels. There are a few different options to re-implement your privacy (living off the grid excluded), and the Tor network has long been one of the best options. But what about when you’re away from you home setup? Adafruit has your back. They’ve posted a guide which will turn a Raspberry Pi into a portable Tor proxy.

The technique requires an Ethernet connection, but these are usually pretty easy to come by in hotels or relatives’ homes. A bit of work configuring the Linux network components will turn the RPi into a WiFi access point. Connect to it with your laptop or smartphone and you can browse like normal. The RPi will anonymize the IP address for all web traffic.

Leveraging the Tor network for privacy isn’t a new subject for us. We’ve looked at tor acks that go all the way back to the beginnings of Hackaday. The subject comes and goes but the hardware for it just keeps getting better!

Using Google Documents As A Web Proxy

January 31, 2012 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

As weird as it might sound, there’s a way to use Google documents as a web proxy. The image above is a screenshot of [Antonio] demonstrating how he can view text data from any site through the web giant’s cloud applications. Certain sites may be blocked from your location, but the big G can load whatever it wants. If all you need is the text, then so can you.

The hack takes advantage of the =IMPORTDATA() function of Google Spreadsheet. We guess the command is meant to make import of XML data possible, but hey, that’s pretty much what HTML data is too, right? But what good it the raw webpage code in a spreadsheet? This is where [Antonio] made a pretty brilliant leap in putting this one together. He authored a bookmarklet that provies a navigation interface, hides the raw code which is stored in the spreasheet, and renders it in the browser. This ties together a user supplied URL, reloading data on the hidden spreadsheet and refreshing the window as necessary. See for yourself in the clip after the break.

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