linux

Going A2DP only on Linux

So if you know me you probably know that you rarely see me without headphones on.  I am not really a collector of anything, except when it comes to heaphones.  I own way more headphones than anyone should.  My latest pair were a Christmas gift from my amazing wife, a pair of Bose Soundlink On Ear Bluetooth headphones(they are absolutely amazing).

The Problem With Standards

I love standards, they make everyones lives easier, but the problem with bluetooth is that it often shows its age.  Anyone who has even a little bit of experience knows that bluetooth might be described as “finicky”.  The way bluetooth deals with different devices is with different profiles. Read Full Article

SSH and X forwarding

I love SSH, coupled with byobu(an updated GNU screen) it is amazingly powerful.  But sometimes it is really useful to be able to view a GUI application on the remote server end.  Some people think that they need to use VNC to do this.  VNC is terrible, and there is a better way.

Things you will need:

  • An X capable SSH client
    • On Linux you don’t have to worry about this
    • On Windows I recommend MobaXTerm
    • On OS X I think you just need to install something like XQuartz
  • A server that has a graphical environment installed on it
    • Ubuntu Desktop is an easy example
    • Gnome/KDE/XFCE/X11 etc.
  • SSH server installed on the server
  • A GUI application that you want to run over SSH

In my example I’m going to be connecting from a Windows computer, using MobaXTerm, to a Ubuntu Desktop machine, and running WireShark(yes I know about tshark).

Make sure sshd is installed on the Ubuntu machine.

$ sudo apt-get install ssh

Back on the Windows machine, we SSH to the Ubuntu machine. Notice that we are specifying -X which allows us to run X applications over SSH

$ ssh -X username@192.168.1.100

Then we run our application

$ wireshark

And there you have it:
WiresharkOverX

That is Wireshark running on the remote Linux machine.  Notice the GTK/Ubuntu looking buttons, and the Windows colored Window frame.

Thanks for stopping by!

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Decrypting TLS Browser Traffic With Wireshark – The Easy Way!

Intro

Most IT people are somewhat familiar with Wireshark.  It is a traffic analyzer, that helps you learn how networking works, diagnose problems and much more.

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One of the problems with the way Wireshark works is that it can’t easily analyze encrypted traffic, like TLS.  It used to be if you had the private key(s) you could feed them into Wireshark and it would decrypt the traffic on the fly, but it only worked when using RSA for the key exchange mechanism.  As people have started to embrace forward secrecy this broke, as having the private key is no longer enough derive the actual session key used to decrypt the data.  The other problem with this is that a private key should not or can not leave the client, server, or HSM it is in.  This lead me to coming up with very contrived ways of man-in-the-middling myself to decrypt the traffic(e.g. sslstrip or mitmproxy).

Session Key Logging to the Rescue!

Well my friends I’m here to tell you that there is an easier way!  It turns out that Firefox and Chrome both support logging the symmetric session key used to encrypt TLS traffic to a file.  You can then point Wireshark at said file and presto! decrypted TLS traffic.  Read on to learn how to set this up. Read Full Article

What is the Best Open Alternative to Active Directory Certificate Services?

PKI vs. CA

First we need to get a few terms straight.  I have heard the terms public key infrastructure(PKI) and certificate authority(CA) sometimes used in conversation interchangeably.  The difference is that a CA by itself doesn’t perform all of the functions of a PKI.  PKIs contain CAs, but they also have other components like certificate revocation lists(CRLs), online certificate status protocol(OCSP) responders that allow clients a higher degree of certainty when assessing whether or not a certificate is valid, even things like policy, which allows you to specify what kinds of certificates or what attributes can be signed by CAs within the PKI.

What is AD CS?

Active Directory Certificate Services(AD CS) is made by Microsoft and it is what a lot of companies use for their PKI needs.  It works well, gives you nice ways to interact with it and runs on Windows Server.  You can request certificates through a (somewhat ugly) web interface, you can also request/issue certificates through a Microsoft Management Console(MMC),  you can request/issue certificates at the command-line with certutil/certreq.  AD CS even handles things like CRL publishing over FTP or SMB and running an OCSP responder, in concert with IIS.  Even though certificate revocation is utterly broken in the consumer world, many PKI uses in the enterprise, e.g. EAP-TLS, generally require revocation to be ‘working’.
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Switching from Apache to Nginx

The Setup

I recently decided that I wanted to learn about Nginx. You may know that Nginx is a web server that has been growing in popularity in the last few years. People use it as an alternative to more traditional web servers like Apache or IIS. They even use it in conjunction with Apache or IIS with Nginx acting as a reverse proxy. Nginx excels at serving up static content and can use fewer resources than Apache or IIS if properly configured, in some scenarios. The one drawback that I had heard about with Nginx was it doesn’t have the breadth of modules that you find in Apache. To illustrate one of the differences, under Apache PHP is loaded as a module while Nginx loads it via FastCGI. Using FastCGI Nginx is able to get comparable performance with potentially lower resource usage.

In terms of configuration Apache is certainly an acquired taste, but once you get it, it is not all that complicated and many of the directives are well documented in the Apache docs. Coming from Apache, configuration of Nginx is surprising easy to pick up. Several things that take 2 or 3 lines on Apache take only 1 on Nginx.
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Setting up an Active Directory Domain Controller using Samba 4 on Ubuntu 14.04

EDIT: There is an updated version of this article for Ubuntu 16.04 here.

I love to mess around with Linux in my home lab and I like to check out the state of Samba from time to time. I have documented the steps that I took to get Samba 4 working as a Active Directory Domain Controller and also made a screencast that I have cross-posted on YouTube. I chose Ubuntu because they have pretty recent packages of Samba, more info about binary packages for different Distributions on the Samba Wiki. If you are following this as a guide, I’m assuming that you have already installed Ubuntu 14.04. If you do watch the screencast, it is best viewed in HD!

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