patrik.cqure.net

Thanks to SavvyAdmin.com I finally got bridging to work with my wireless device in VirtualBox. I have not yet given it as extensive testing that I would like but my first impression is that it actually works. In order to get it running you need two programs bcrelay and parprouted. I just this minute finnished typing the last lines of my script that starts bridging between a given interface and the wlan. The script is somewhat long as it enables ip forwarding, makes apropriate changes in my firewall configuration, starts the daemons and finally tries to reset it all when it ends. I have posted the script here for anyone who would like to try it out. Feel free to drop me a line with suggestions or changes.

Posted by Patrik in Virtualization | No Comments

Sun released the 2.0.2 maintenance release yesterday. Judging by the changelog it fixes a number of kernel related crashes of the guest os and a number of GUI crashes. Might be good to upgrade in other words.

Posted by Patrik in Virtualization | No Comments

Virtualbox 2.0.0 was released yesterday. Be sure to check it out at www.virtualbox.org.
A part from the GUI improvements it contains a couple of performance improvements and bugfixes. The complete changelog is here.

If you don't want to end up loosing some work (as I did), make sure you don't have any machines with their state saved (ie. make sure you shut all machines down) before you upgrade.

Posted by Patrik in Virtualization | No Comments

So I finally had some great success running airbase-ng as a rouge AP. I ended up buying the Alfa AWUS036H, an excellent 500mw Realtek 8187 based card. I am running a Virtual Gentoo system with the git version of the rtl8187 driver. The SKB BUF error messages from the aircrack-ng version of the driver where too annoying.

All in all I am very pleased with the setup, as it behaves consistantly now (knowing the needed tweaks to get it running). I believe it performs as well as running an AP with the madwifi-ng karma kernel patches from digininja. Well, except for one thing. When changing the MAC address of the wifi card it doesn't really do such a good job anymore. For some reason most clients fail to associate, some still do but theres a considerable drop in the number of connecting clients.

I have tried to change the MAC using both ifconfig and simply specifying the -a option to airbase-ng. Sniffing the traffic using another wifi card shows a lot of probe requests and responses being re-sent, but no requests to associate. From my initial checks I do not see any difference in the requests or responses apart from the "Frame check sequence" and the MAC of-course. But then again, I haven't put that much time into it.

ANY insight into why this happens, and if I am missing something REALLY obvious would be great. I will file a bugreport in the aircrack-ng TRAC system once I collect and clean the relevant packet traces.

Posted by Patrik in Security | No Comments

I recently changed mobile phones from my LG KS20 to a Nokia E71. All in all I am very pleased with the change to Nokia and I must say that I am truly impressed with this model. Well, except for PC suite not working with Virtualbox ofcourse I don't know whos to blame but the software does not want to connect to my phone over USB. It finds the phone and installs all the right drivers but once PC Suite tries to connect I get "PC Suite does not regcognise the connected phone. The connection between the PC and phone failed, error code 0x80044403. Switch of your phone, switch it on, and try again."

I am running the latest PC Suite 7.0.8.2 on Windows XP in Virtualbox 1.6.4. My current workaround is to connect to the phone over bluetooth from the same Virtual XP installation using a USB Bluetooth dongle. I must say that this part is a bit of a pain in the ..... Well, I guess you can't have it all.

The issue has been reported at both Virtualbox and Nokia forums so hopefully there will be a fix soon.

Posted by Patrik in Virtualization | 2 Comments

OK so I've been able to get things running quite smoothly now. I cracked my Linksys WUSB54GC card open and soldered a pigtail connector to it according to the following photo http://www.josepino.com/other_projects/antenna/usb-antenna.jpg. I also added txPowerTuning=36 as option to the rt73 driver which I believe did make things somewhat better.

What remains in order to get a good solid environment running is a better wifi card with a lot better transmit power, which I've ordered from the UK today. Hopefully it will be here by monday so me and my friend can do some more tests over a beer or two.

Posted by Patrik in Security | 2 Comments

I have had some better luck with airbase-ng the last few days, most likely due to a combination of factors.

For starters I (once more) ripped apart my USB adapter and de-soldered my external antenna cable and found a better spot for it. The new re-fitted antenna works a lot better now and actually picks up quite a few new networks (and clients of course).

Another change I made was to switch the wireless drivers to the ones available from the git kernel sources which for the moment seem to work better than the previous ones.

I still believe in the airbase-ng concept of a user-mode AP which works with many different chipsets and not that dependent of driver patches. However, in order to switch away from the madwifi-patches it has to work atleast as good as they do and with a USB wifi-interface.

Once I get things running I'll post my setup here. If someone already has done so, please drop me a line with your setup including hardware

Posted by Patrik in Security | No Comments

I recently purchased a new Asus eee 900 as I dropped my previous lovely pink 700 in the floor breaking the screen Due to its small size I thought it could be suitable for carrying around while performing wireless assesments. This led me to setting it up as both a scanning/monitoring device using the built-in wireless interface and a fake access point. Kismet basically ran out of the box while the fake access point took some more work.

As a friend told me about the airbase-ng project I though I would give it a shot...

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Posted by Patrik in Security | 2 Comments

I have been meaning to look into using Virtualbox as an alternative for VMware Workstation that I have been using for quite sometime. Now, that I have been running them in parallel for almost a month I see some  benefits and some disadvantages with both. The definition of personal use for Virtualbox is undeniably a big benefit. According to the licensing FAQ this is the definition of personal use:

"Personal use is when you install the product on one or more PCs yourself and you make use of it (or even your friend, sister and grandmother). It doesn't matter whether you just use it for fun or run your multi-million euro business with it. Also, if you install it on your work PC at some large company, this is still personal use. However, if you are an administrator and want to deploy it to the 500 desktops in your company, this would not qualify as personal use. Well, you could ask each of your 500 employees to install VirtualBox but don't you think we deserve some money in this case? We'd even assist you with any issue you might have."

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Posted by Patrik in Virtualization | No Comments

Updating to version 0.5.0 brings even greate power and functionality to Do. At the time of the writing this version is not available in Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy. In order to install it follow the installation guide here.

I realized that I was missing a dependency (libevolution3.0-cil) needed to get the Evolution plugin running. Simply installing it after Do was in place resolved my troubles:

sudo aptitude install libevolution3.0-cil

Posted by Patrik in Ubuntu | No Comments