Encrypted Instant Messages using Pidgin

The Internet is a public network, and Instant Messaging is one of its insecure applications to transmit data on. As we all know, we send and receive messages as plain-text. Good news for Pidgin users. Using the Pidgin-encryption plug-in, we may now encrypt our messages using RSA(it supports up to 4096 bit keys). Please take note that both IM sender and IM recipient should be running Pidgin and the plug-in.

Procedures to use the plugin:

1. Download the installer for your Operating system at:
http://pidgin-encrypt.sourceforge.net/
2. After the download, close all pidgin sessions.
3. Install the plug-in and reopen Pidgin.
4. Click Ctrl+U to Open the plugins menu.
5. Ensure that the checkbox "Automatically encrypt if sent an encrypted message"
6. Open a chat session window to your message recipient. On the upper portion of the chat window, you should be able to see a greyed out padlock icon. Clicking on this icon will send your public key to the message recipient, and vice versa.
7. At this time, both padlock icons on the sender and recipient message windows should appear to be colored green. Messages are now encrypted.

Here is a raw network capture from Wireshark (user1 and user2 are the example sender and recipient):

YMSG.............^.;5..user1..4..user2..252..Z/YAXR/gsD81TK//5AKdAQDlhLP/tA==..97..1..14..*** Encrypted :: Key: Prot NSS 1.0: Len 249:f/4NLoFOLHIPWvvhaZJjo9Ec5+kgGm8w,MIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCBiQKBgQC9JZlcgp8bW2THtnYFVAMzLThbRn53aYPoOJx+gcs+D1AsnO+s+hezzIqToMGjpm+kDitcuX6oHa/vB8dWR3YUWYXaqjqAAgIFuXan6QEMQdxl2S4f4Le9xmjxQM0pW5Ly5MB7eZjW0GEuywvFR6ZhJGX9JY+b4+Pg7GtE/Y6HsQIDAQAB..63..;0..64..0..

Tenable changes Nessus feed subscription packages

The change in the subscription can be a cause of uncertainty or doubt for Corporate users.

However, looking at the bright side, it might be beneficial to the community, as users that are not on the professional feed, may need to create their own plugins.

This news might bring a good change to the Security community.

Interview with Ron Gula, CEO of Tenable:

http://media.libsyn.com/media/mckeay/nsp-RonGula-NessusLicense.mp3

Blackhat and Defcon videos for offline viewing

It may be financially and geographically improbable for some people to attend Security Conferences that we'd like to attend to. Yes, it would be neat if we can all attend, but due to economic and work related factors, we may not have the opportunity to do so.

It's a good thing that the good folks at easynews have compiled this for the rest of us to view. The site hosts recent events of blackhat, defcon and other security conferences. The top domain also has mirrors of notable sites :)

Check the link out.

ftp://mirrors.easynews.com/blackhat&defcon/

Nifty nmap scanning options

nmap -p for specifying the port to scan
nmap -O -v for remote OS fingerprinting
nmap -A -T4 -F for daemon version detection

Having an offsite backup for most people

I got a huge collection of documentation(security, programming, networking, and other miscellaneous docs lying around in my disk). There is a huge possibility that i might be moving out of the Phillippines, to pursue greater goals in my life, so i better have backups of the tons of data i collected over the years :)

That's where gspace comes in handy. What this tool does is that it provides a UI for uploading and downloading files from gmail, using Mozilla Firefox. I can have mutliple accounts and juggle file uploads using gspace.

Try it out, it's quite handy for people who needs to have multiple backups as a necessity

http://www.getgspace.com/

Republishing netsh kung fu :)

Blogger locked the blog, maybe because i wasn't updating the blog in a while, in any case here it is again:

Adding an IP address:

netsh interface ip set address "Local Area Connection" static _ip_ _netmask_ _gateway_ 1

netsh interface ip set dns "Local Area Connection" static _dns ip_