Raspberry Pi projects

Leave a reply

Back in May and June, I did a project for school with 6 Raspberry Pis to build a WIDs. It went good. I wrote an article, I’m waiting to hear back if it’ll get published.

After the project, I had 6 Raspberry Pis kicking around. I have a project I want to work on, that could lead to another article. I just need to build my skills up to that first.

To get there, I wanted to build an Onion Pi. This will tie in to another project I’m working on. As some of you know I’m a fan of The Onion Router (TOR), especially when I’m doing Intelligence related research. The Onion Pi would be a good thing to have in the bag of tricks.

To get the Onion Pi working, I needed to go through the Adafruit Wifi Access Point. This is the second time I build an AP. This one is just a little different than last time. This time instead of an Edimax wireless card, I went with one of my TP Link TL-WN722Ns. I wanted the external antenna. I was using the 2014-09-09_wheezy_raspbian image.

Hostapd didn’t work right. It kept throwing errors on start about nl80211 not being a known driver. I had to build hostapd from source, which needed to have libssl-dev and libnl-1.1 installed, to get hostpad to build right. Then I needed to copy my built version into the right place.

I also had problems with isc-dhcp-server and tor starting. It looks like wlan0 isn’t starting properly. I’ll have to troubleshoot it more later. Adafruit has a comment about disabling wpa_supplicant. I don’t know if that will fix the problem though. I’ll follow up after.

New Semester

Leave a reply

Haven’t written in a while. I’m still waiting to hear back on a project, before I can write about it here.

This term I’m taking Ethical Hacking, Network Forensics, and Elementary Statistics.

Each of those deserve a post on their own. Because of Ethical Hacking, I got the latest version of “The Basics of Penetration Testing and Hacking”:. Turns out I had half the books for Network Forensics already (the other one was on my wishlist), so that’s a bonus too.

We won’t talk about Stats, I have nothing nice to say about it.

If all goes right, I should be done with undergrad in December.

Practical Anonymity by Peter Loshin

Leave a reply

I got a copy of Practical Anonymity by Peter Loshin a while back via O’Reilly, had a sell on it. I finished it about two weeks ago. For what it sounded like it would be, I’m disappointed. I was expecting something more along the lines of “How to be Invisible”. For what it was, it was pretty good.

Continue reading →

On what planet is General Alexander worth $1,000,000.00 a month?

2 Replies

The news wires reported General Keith Alexander moved in to the private sector, and offering his services to finance companies for a million dollars a month. This is the person that took control as the director of the National Security Agency on August 1, 2005 and left in October 2013 (Wikipedia). Remember, that was after the Edward Snowden leaks came out.

Which really leads one to wonder were those really leaks, or was that a case of we know this is compromised lets make it public knowledge so we can hide the real data. Here is an interesting thought, is Snowden really still working for the U.S. Government?

If you’ve read the Cryptonomicon or seen the Sherlock episode “A Scandal in Belgravia“, you probably know what I mean. For those that need a quick refresher – let assets of lower value go, to hide the assets of higher value. Blow up planes with dead people on them, instead of letting real passenger jets get blown up. Let a German U-Boat sink a freighter or get past the blockade to keep them from realizing that the codes are broken.

The C-Levels at banks should be asking some hard questions if Gen. Alexander is showing up offering them service. Like what really happened on the Snowden watch. How does that failure make his people qualified for the private sector’s needs? Yes while Gen. Alexander may have some Government related attack sources, we already have that in the private sector with Infragard, and the different breach reports.

 

using 1000 mA to power Raspberry Pi and TL-WN722N

Leave a reply

I’m working on a project using the Raspberry Pi. The requirement was that I use the TP-LINK TL-WN722N, actually I just needed a wireless adapter with an external antenna. When I found the TL-WN722N on Amazon, the reviews said people were having no problems plugging the device straight in to the Raspberry Pi.

While researching things today, I came across this penetration testing article by Cyber Arms. There, and several places on the Raspberry Pi forums it said that people needed to use 2.1 amp usb chargers. The others wouldn’t do what was needed with the Pi, and the wireless adapter plugged in. So I went out and got 3, 2.1 amp plugs, when I bought extra Raspberry Pi units.

I’ve done some testing with the power cables I got last time. the standard 5v, 1000 mA (1 amp) ones, and it ran the plug for the wireless keyboard remote (small keyobard) and the wireless adapter, with no problem.

Here is the one I got, it’s made in China, and sold via MCM. Sorry about the flash on the photo, but that was the best one I got after 10 tries.

20140620_231412 20140620_232347

I’ve been busy again:

Leave a reply

I know I haven’t written here lately, and I’m not getting in the number of blog posts I want per week. However I’ve been busy with school and projects. I only have time right now, because I can only run 1 Raspberry Pi (of 6) at a time (right now), and the first one is going through Kali’s apt-get upgrade. Man talk about not the fastest. Going to clone that drive and copy to other flash drives.

Currently, I’m working on a project for my independent study at Eastern Michigan University. The project and documents have to be turned in by Monday night, so I’ll talk about that after I get the stuff done.

The Eastern Michigan Campus Crime Project turned out really well. My team and I presented on it at Circle City Con in Indianapolis.  What I thought was going to be a simple 4 week project will probably take the rest of the year to complete. That’s with 4 of us working on it. There is some more interest on campus and suggestions on how to move this forward. I’ve got a really good team, and I’m really proud to have worked with them on the project.

I also dug out, and updated (slightly) my Human Trafficking talk. I’m a little wary of posting that one. Goes against my OPSEC views, but the presentation is important enough. I will say this, things have changed in a year+ since I stopped working on it. Got some good books to go with it too, I’ll get reviews of them up eventually.

There will be another book review up over the weekend (probably Sunday) as well.

The C.I. Desk: FBI and CIA Counterintelligence As Seen From My Cubicle By Christopher Lynch

Leave a reply

I’ve read a few other biographies and case histories from people that work at the CIA, but this one wasn’t as interesting as those. I understand that the book had to go through Pre-Publication review at both the FBI and the CIA, but what was left was mostly Mr. Lynch’s The C.I. Desk (Amazon Affiliate Link) was him complaining about each and every job he had (or at least that’s what stuck with me). I understand that things had to be taken out, and he would point out that parts were cut by the agencies, including one whole chapter. While there was some entertaining things in the book, and some insights, the part of the book I was most struck with was the Bureaucratic Behemoth that he felt he was fighting against.

Over all, I wasn’t impressed with this book. Mr. Lynch worked for Robert Hanssen, and worked with Aldrich Ames while they were active in spying against the US, but his unit’s didn’t track down the spies in the organizations, even though their job was supposed to be Counter Intelligence.

* Update 2024-10-05: changed to Amazon Affiliate Link, which I earn a commission from qualifying purchases.