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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Security’ Category

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CyberChef: The Cyber Swiss Army Knife – a web app for encryption, encoding, compression and data analysis.

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/06/23

[Wayback/Archive.is] CyberChef:

a simple, intuitive web app for carrying out all manner of “cyber” operations within a web browser. These operations include simple encoding like XOR or Base64, more complex encryption like AES, DES and Blowfish, creating binary and hexdumps, compression and decompression of data, calculating hashes and checksums, IPv6 and X.509 parsing, changing character encodings, and much more.

Source code at [Wayback/Archive.is] gchq/CyberChef: The Cyber Swiss Army Knife – a web app for encryption, encoding, compression and data analysis.

Via [Archive.is] Jilles🏳️‍🌈 on Twitter: “Hidden in plain sight. Rot13 cross word. Hidden Barcodes. Qr codes. Barely any InfoSec skill required. Still a hand full. Usually my to go place is: Cyberchef. I did a fun one for cyberklaas using ansi art.… “

Jilles also pointed to the solving part in [Archive.is] Jilles🏳️‍🌈 on Twitter: “See also, for solving: SCWF… “

The [Wayback/Archive.is] Solve Crypto with Force! needs to run without most script blockers, so best run it in an anonymous/private browser window.

Source code for SCWF is at [Wayback/Archive.is] DaWouw/SCWF: CTF tool for identifying, brute forcing and decoding encryption schemes in an automated way.

Screen shot of Cyberchef example “Perform AES decryption, extracting the IV from the beginning of the cipher stream” [Archive.is]:

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Posted in Barcode, Cyberchef, Development, EAN, Encoding, Encryption, Hashing, Power User, QR code, Security, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

2fa.directory: public list of sites with two factor auth support which includes SMS, email, phone calls, hardware, and software.

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/05/09

List of sites with two factor auth support which includes SMS, email, phone calls, hardware, and software.

[Wayback/Archive.is] twofactorauth at 2fa.directory with GitHub sources at [Wayback/Archive.is] 2factorauth/twofactorauth: List of sites with two factor auth support which includes SMS, email, phone calls, hardware, and software..

Via: [Archive.is] Jilles🏳️‍🌈 on Twitter: “Ik gebruik custom e-mail accounts + 1Password/keepass en MFA; Yubikey, Authy, Authenticator. Geef geen eerlijk antwoord op googlebare security questions. En nog steeds ligt alles op straat. Tip: https://t2fa.directory … “

–jeroen

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Posted in 2FA/MFA, Authentication, Authy, Power User, Security | Leave a Comment »

Setting up a GitLab project so it is served over https as a gitlab.io and a custom subdomain

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/05/05

Last week, I posted about Setting up a GitHub project so it is served over https as a custom github.io subdomain.

Today it’s the equivalent, but on GitLab.

Why GitLab? Two major reasons: unlike GitHub:

  1. it’s open source
  2. provides way more granular control over permissions
  3. allows a hierarchy of repositories on which you can specify that permission control

Already 2. and 3. combined are a huge advantage, though we will see that 3. also makes some of the subcases (hosting as user.gitlab.io from account gitlab.com/user where user is your username) is harder than the similar user.github.io, github.com/user combo.

So here we go, starting with a similar set of links:

The goal is to have

  1. page projects as or under wiert.gitlab.io (like wiert.gitlab.io/wiert)
  2. a gitlabstatus.wiert.me plain html (or maybe markdown) page project that eventually will show some status information (kind of like status.gitlab.com, but for different things).

The beauty of GitLab is that it supports hierarchies of repositories through groups and subgroups, so I already had these subgroups hoping they would cover both the first and second kind of page projects:

Steps I did

Since there are quite a few links above, here are the steps I took from my gitlab.com/wiert account and gitlab.com/wiert.me group.

Steps for wiert.gitlab.io/wiert

  1. For wiert.gitlab.io/wiert, try A (failed in part, and therefore interesting to understand why):
    1. Under leaf group gitlab.com/wiert.me/public/web/sites/gitlab.io, created a new GitLab repository
    2. Chose “Create from template”
    3. Chose the template “Pages/Plain HTML”
    4. Named the project “wiert” (with slug “wiert“) so it would appear at gitlab.com/wiert.me/public/web/sites/gitlab.io/wiert
    5. From the left sidebar, navigated to your project’s “CI/CD”, then “Pipelines”
    6. Now I got in a confusing situation as the page indicated “There are currently no pipelines.”, but an enabled blue “Run pipeline” button:
      By default there is no CI/CD pipeline, but there is an enabled blue "Run pipeline" button: confusing.

      By default there is no CI/CD pipeline, but there is an enabled blue “Run pipeline” button: confusing.

    7. Clicked the “Run pipeline” button nonetheless, and that created [Wayback/Archive.is] a pipeline asking for parameters (that already had correct default values) and revealed a new blue “Run pipeline” button.
    8. Clicked that new “Run pipeline button” which created [Wayback/Archive.is] a job and deployed the page.
    9. From the left sidebar, navigated to “Settings”, then “Pages” to get the links to the pages site: http://wiert.me.gitlab.io/public/web/sites/gitlab.io/wiert/ and https://wiert.me.gitlab.io/public/web/sites/gitlab.io/wiert/
      Warning: When using Pages under the general domain of a GitLab instance (gitlab.io), you cannot use HTTPS with sub-subdomains.

      Warning: When using Pages under the general domain of a GitLab instance (gitlab.io), you cannot use HTTPS with sub-subdomains.

      The sites do work (see the [Archive.is http version] and [Archive.is https version]), but the HTTPS fails because wiert.me.gitlab.io does not match the SANs (Subject Alternative Names) in the certificate: *.gitlab.io, gitlab.io

  2. For wiert.gitlab.io/wiert, try B (failed, and therefore interesting to understand why):
    1. In my my groups gitlab.com/dashboard/groups, added a new group wiert
    2. Added subgroups until the leaf gitlab.com/wiert/public/web/sites/gitlab.io which as URL is gitlab.com/wier1/public/web/sites/gitlab.io because user account wiert already occupies gitlab.com/wiert.
    3. Under leaf group gitlab.com/wier1/public/web/sites/gitlab.io, created a new GitLab repository
    4. Chose “Create from template”
    5. Chose the template “Pages/Plain HTML”
    6. Named the project “wiert” (with slug “wiert“) so it would appear at gitlab.com/wiert.me/public/web/sites/gitlab.io/wiert
    7. From the left sidebar, navigated to your project’s “CI/CD”, then “Pipelines”
    8. Again there was “There are currently no pipelines.”, but an enabled blue “Run pipeline” button, which I clicked
    9. That created [Wayback/Archive.is] a pipeline asking for parameters (that already had correct default values) and revealed a new blue “Run pipeline” button.
    10. Clicked that new “Run pipeline button” which created [Wayback/Archive.is] a job deployed the page.
    11. From the left sidebar, navigated to “Settings”, then “Pages” to get the links to the pages site: http://wier1.gitlab.io/public/web/sites/gitlab.io/wiert and https://wier1.gitlab.io/public/web/sites/gitlab.io/wiert.
      Bummer: again not the wiert.gitlab.io/wiert I hoped for
      The sites do work (see the [Archive.is http version] and [Archive.is https version]). The HTTP does not redirect to the HTTP version, as I did not tick the

      ☐ Force HTTPS (requires valid certificates)

    12. If a user wiert exists and occupies gitlab.com/wiert, then a group named wiert cannot occupy gitlab.com/wiert, and therefore a project named wiert within that group won’t be deployed to wiert.gitlab.io/wiert.
      Maybe this can be shortened like “if there is a user wiert, then no group named wiert cannot be used to contain a project named wiert to host as wiert.gitlab.io/wiert“.
      Let’s find out!
  3. For  wiert.gitlab.io/wiert, try C (success, steps 1, 3, 4, 7 and 8 were the key ones):
    1. In my user gitlab.com/wiert, created a new GitLab repository
    2. Chose “Create from template”
    3. Chose the template “Pages/Plain HTML”
    4. Named the project “wiert” (with slug “wiert“) so it would appear at gitlab.com/wiert
    5. The odd but cool thing is that the actual project now ended up at gitlab.com/wiert/wiert:
    6. From the left sidebar, navigated to your project’s “CI/CD”, then “Pipelines”
    7. Again there was “There are currently no pipelines.”, but an enabled blue “Run pipeline” button, which I clicked
    8. That created [Wayback/Archive.is] a pipeline asking for parameters (that already had correct default values) and revealed a new blue “Run pipeline” button.
    9. Clicked that new “Run pipeline button” which created [Wayback/Archive.is] a job deployed the page.
    10. From the left sidebar, navigated to “Settings”, then “Pages” to get the links to the pages site: http://wiert.gitlab.io/wiert/ and https://wiert.gitlab.io/wiert/.
      Success: finally the wiert.gitlab.io/wiert I hoped for:

      Success: published at https://wiert.gitlab.io/wiert/

      Success: published at https://wiert.gitlab.io/wiert/

      The sites do work fine (see the [Archive.is http version] and [Archive.is https version]). The HTTP does not redirect to the HTTP version, as I did not tick the

      ☐ Force HTTPS (requires valid certificates)

Steps for wiert.gitlab.io

  1. For wiert.gitlab.io, try A (failed, and therefore interesting to understand why):
    1. Under leaf group gitlab.com/wiert.me/public/web/sites/gitlab.io, created a new GitLab repository
    2. Chose “Create from template”
    3. Chose the template “Pages/Plain HTML”
    4. Named the project “wiert.gitlab.io” (with slug “wiert.gitlab.io“) so it would appear at gitlab.com/wiert.me/public/web/sites/gitlab.io/wiert.gitlab.io
    5. From the left sidebar, navigated to your project’s “CI/CD”, then “Pipelines”
    6. Again there was “There are currently no pipelines.”, but an enabled blue “Run pipeline” button, which I clicked
    7. That created [Wayback/Archive.is] a pipeline asking for parameters (that already had correct default values) and revealed a new blue “Run pipeline” button.
    8. Clicked that new “Run pipeline button” which created [Wayback/Archive.is] a job deployed the page.
    9. From the left sidebar, navigated to “Settings”, then “Pages” to get the links to the pages site: http://wiert.me.gitlab.io/public/web/sites/gitlab.io/wiert.gitlab.io and https://wiert.me.gitlab.io/public/web/sites/gitlab.io/wiert.gitlab.io.
      Failure: not the wiert.gitlab.io I hoped for.

      The sites do work (see the [Archive.is http version] and [Archive.is https version]), but the HTTPS fails because wiert.me.gitlab.io does not match the SANs (Subject Alternative Names) in the certificate: *.gitlab.io, gitlab.io. The HTTP does not redirect to the HTTP version, as I did not tick the

      ☐ Force HTTPS (requires valid certificates)

  2. For wiert.gitlab.io, try B (failed, and therefore interesting to understand why):
    1. Under leaf group gitlab.com/wier1/public/web/sites/gitlab.io, created a new GitLab repository
    2. Chose “Create from template”
    3. Chose the template “Pages/Plain HTML”
    4. Named the project “wiert.gitlab.io” (with slug “wiert.gitlab.io“) so it would appear at gitlab.com/wier1/public/web/sites/gitlab.io/wiert.gitlab.io
    5. From the left sidebar, navigated to your project’s “CI/CD”, then “Pipelines”
    6. Again there was “There are currently no pipelines.”, but an enabled blue “Run pipeline” button, which I clicked
    7. That created [Wayback/Archive.is] a pipeline asking for parameters (that already had correct default values) and revealed a new blue “Run pipeline” button.
    8. Clicked that new “Run pipeline button” which created [Wayback/Archive.is] a job deployed the page.
    9. From the left sidebar, navigated to “Settings”, then “Pages” to get the links to the pages site: http://wier1.gitlab.io/public/web/sites/gitlab.io/wiert.gitlab.io and https://wier1.gitlab.io/public/web/sites/gitlab.io/wiert.
      Bummer: again not the wiert.gitlab.io I hoped for
      The sites do work (see the [Archive.is http version] and [Archive.is https version]). The HTTP does not redirect to the HTTP version, as I did not tick the

      ☐ Force HTTPS (requires valid certificates)

    10. Try A and B were almost identical to wiert.gitlab.io/wiert try A and B, so let’s see if the solution C for that also works for us:
  3. For wiert.gitlab.io, try C (success, steps 1, 3, 4, 7 and 9 were the key ones)
    1. In my user gitlab.com/wiert, created a new GitLab repository
    2. Chose “Create from template”
    3. Chose the template “Pages/Plain HTML”
    4. Named the project “wiert.gitlab.io” (with slug “wiert.gitlab.io“) so it would appear at gitlab.com/wiert/wiert.gitlab.io.
    5. From the left sidebar, navigated to your project’s “CI/CD”, then “Pipelines”
    6. Again there was “There are currently no pipelines.”, but an enabled blue “Run pipeline” button, which I clicked
    7. That created [Wayback/Archive.is] a pipeline asking for parameters (that already had correct default values) and revealed a new blue “Run pipeline” button.
    8. Clicked that new “Run pipeline button” which created [Wayback/Archive.is] a job deployed the page.
    9. From the left sidebar, navigated to “Settings”, then “Pages” to get the links to the pages site: http://wiert.gitlab.io/ and https://wiert.gitlab.io/.
      Success: finally the wiert.gitlab.io I hoped for with working sites (see the [Archive.is http version] and [Archive.is https version]).
    10. Note the HTTP does not redirect to the HTTP version, as I did not tick the

      ☐ Force HTTPS (requires valid certificates)

Steps for gitlabstatus.wiert.me

Having learned from the GitHub githubstatus.wiert.me procedure (where I had to wait a long time for the default *.wiert.me domain mapping timeout and the githubstatus.wiert.me DNS CNAME record to become effective), I started on the DNS CNAME record side which is documented at [Wayback] Custom domains and SSL/TLS certificates: Section 3. Set up DNS records for Pages: For subdomains | GitLab:

Subdomains (subdomain.example.com) require:

  • A DNS CNAME record pointing your subdomain to the Pages server.
  • A DNS TXT record to verify your domain’s ownership.
From DNS Record To
subdomain.example.com CNAME namespace.gitlab.io
_gitlab-pages-verification-code.subdomain.example.com TXT gitlab-pages-verification-code=00112233445566778899aabbccddeeff

Note that, whether it’s a user or a project website, the CNAME should point to your Pages domain (namespace.gitlab.io), without any /project-name.

DNS CNAME record pointing to GitLab.com project

The value for the TXT record is only known after you created the pages project, but the value for the CNAME record is known beforehand:

From DNS Record To
gitlabstatus.wiert.me CNAME namespace.gitlab.io

So let’s see if I can do this in one try, with these steps:

  1. For gitlabstatus.wiert.me, try A (success, steps 1, 3, 4, 7 and 9 were the key ones)
    1. In my DNS settings of the wiert.me domain, created a CNAME record from gitlabstatus.wiert.me to namespace.gitlab.io:

      gitlabstatus.wiert.me CNAME record pointing to namespace.gitlab.io

      gitlabstatus.wiert.me CNAME record pointing to namespace.gitlab.io

    2. Under leaf group gitlab.com/wiert.me/public/web/sites/wiert.me, created a new GitLab repository
    3. Chose “Create from template”
    4. Chose the template “Pages/Plain HTML”
    5. Named the project “gitlabstatus.wiert.me” (with slug “gitlabstatus.wiert.me“) so it would appear at gitlab.com/wiert.me/public/web/sites/wiert.me/gitlabstatus.wiert.me
    6. From the left sidebar, navigated to your project’s “CI/CD”, then “Pipelines”
    7. Again there was “There are currently no pipelines.”, but an enabled blue “Run pipeline” button, which I clicked
    8. That created [Wayback/Archive.is] a pipeline asking for parameters (that already had correct default values) and revealed a new blue “Run pipeline” button.
    9. Clicked that new “Run pipeline button” which created [Wayback/Archive.is] a job deployed the page.
    10. From the left sidebar, navigated to “Settings”, then “Pages” to get the links to the pages site: http://wiert.me.gitlab.io/public/web/sites/wiert.me/gitlabstatus.wiert.me and https://wiert.me.gitlab.io/public/web/sites/wiert.me/gitlabstatus.wiert.me.
      Intermediate success: working sites (see the [Archive.is http version] and [Archive.is https version]).
    11. Now it is time to get the DNS CNAME record from gitlabstatus.wiert.me to namespace.gitlab.io into operation by clicking the “New Domain” button:
      "New Domain" button in the "Pages" settings.

      “New Domain” button in the “Pages” settings.

    12. There I filled in the correct gitlabstatus.wiert.me domain name, then pressed the “Create New Domain” button:

      New domain becomes gitlabstatus.wiert.me

      New domain becomes gitlabstatus.wiert.me

    13. Then a page appeared voiding the DNS CNAME work I already did: the documentation is clearly wrong as these are the two DNS record entries to be made as shown by gitlab.com/wiert.me/public/web/sites/wiert.me/gitlabstatus.wiert.me/pages/domains/gitlabstatus.wiert.me:
      Correct instructions for the DNS records to get gitlabstatus.wiert.me working

      Correct instructions for the DNS records to get gitlabstatus.wiert.me working

      Subdomains (gitlabstatus.wiert.me) require:

      • A DNS CNAME record pointing your subdomain to the Pages server.
      • A DNS TXT record to verify your domain’s ownership.
      From DNS Record To
      gitlabstatus.wiert.me CNAME wiert.me.gitlab.io.
      _gitlab-pages-verification-code.gitlabstatus.wiert.me TXT gitlab-pages-verification-code=c5619988d386b1a36c253ce05db55dbb

      Basically the whole namespace.gitlab.io part of the documentation is a placeholder for the actual namespace that belongs to the leaf group the pages project is in (in my case wiert.me).

      So this is the new DNS entry, for which I had to wait until the DNS TTL to time out and effectuate:
      New DNS gitlabstatus.wiert.me CNAME record pointing to wiert.me.gitlab.io

      New DNS gitlabstatus.wiert.me CNAME record pointing to wiert.me.gitlab.io

      Note that this DNS administrative interface from WordPress.com does omit the final period of the CNAME destination (officially this would be wiert.me.gitlab.io.)

    14. After the CNAME DNS record, I also made the TXT DNS record:
      New DNS TXT record for verification of gitlabstatus.wiert.me

      New DNS TXT record for verification of gitlabstatus.wiert.me

      Then I waited a little for the DNS TXT record to be saved and try the verification of the TXT record.

    15. Even then, verification took some time. I had to click the refresh button a few times before verification succeeded:
      The DNS TXT record for gitlabstatus.wiert.me finally got verified

      The DNS TXT record for gitlabstatus.wiert.me finally got verified

    16. Now I could press blue “Save Changes” button below and waited for the CNAME record DNS TTL to expire so I could check the domain and – hopefully – the TLS certificate to be requested by Let’s Encrypt:
      After the gitlabstatus.wiert DNS TXT record got verified, I could save the domain information

      After the gitlabstatus.wiert DNS TXT record got verified, I could save the domain information

    17. After the old CNAME record DNS TTL expired and the new CNAME record came into effect, the domain became available as http://gitlabstatus.wiert.me/:
      Waiting for gitlabstatus.wiert.me to become active

      Waiting for gitlabstatus.wiert.me to become active

    18. After verification, the “Domains (1)” bit changed from this:
      Domain gitlabstatus.wiert.me information before verification

      Domain gitlabstatus.wiert.me information before verification

      to this:

      Domain gitlabstatus.wiert.me information after verification

      Domain gitlabstatus.wiert.me information after verification

    19. In the mean time, also the TLS certificate got issued by Let’s Encrypt, so the final sites now both worked: http://gitlabstatus.wiert.me/ and https://gitlabstatus.wiert.me/.
    20. Success: finally the gitlabstatus.wiert.me I hoped for with working sites (see the [Archive.is http version] and [Archive.is https version] for the wiert.me domain, and [Archive.is http version] and [Archive.is https version] for the wiert.me domain).
    21. Note the HTTP does not redirect to the HTTP version, as I did not tick the

      ☐ Force HTTPS (requires valid certificates)

In retrospect, this could have been shorter when I had done the DNS part later, which is contrary to how to do this with GitHub.

Conclusion

The conclusion seems this:

Gitlab Page repositories to be published as or under wiert.gitlab.io need to reside directly under user wiert. Having them reside under a different group like wiert or wiert.me won’t work.

Or in more generic terms:

When creating pages as user.gitlab.io you have to put your pages projects directly under your user account gitlab.com/user.

Putting them under groups or leaf groups fails, no matter if the (leaf) group is named user or otherwise.

In addition, you can add custom domains to any Gitlab repository (even one that never stated out as a GitLab Pages repository). It will work as soon as the domain DNS mapping is setup through both a CNAME mapping record and TXT verification record.

The steps for this in your GitLab repository are:

  1. Ensure you have a valid .gitlab-ci.yml file at the root of your repository; I used the [Wayback/Archive.is] one from [Wayback/Archive] GitLab Pages examples / plain-html · GitLab as my site is purely static
  2. Ensure you have a valid index.html file in the public directory of your repository, similar to [Wayback/Archive] GitLab Pages examples / plain-html · GitLab
  3. When both 1. and 2. are committed in your repository at GitLab, then it will automatically be deployed to a docker container on gitlab.io, which allows the outside world to visit your GitHub Pages sie, and the Let’s Encrypt Certificate to be generated (and prevents this error: [Wayback/Archive] GitLab Pages integration with Let’s Encrypt | GitLab: “Something went wrong while obtaining the Let’s Encrypt certificate”).
  4. Under “Settings” -> “Pages”, add a new domain name to the repository: now it automatically becomes a GitLab Pages repository.
  5. When adding the domain, the settings page will show both a DNS CNAME record and DNS TXT record; ensure both are applied on your primary DNS name server and replicated to all authoritative DNS name servers.
  6. Save the new page.
  7. Check if the page is available on the new domain you added.
  8. Optionally under “Settings” -> “Pages” enable the “Force HTTPS (requires valid certificates)” option and save.

TLS information

Note: I saved the TLS information – including certificates here:

More about the Let’s Encrypt certificates at [Wayback] Chain of Trust – Let’s Encrypt:

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Cloud, Communications Development, Development, DNS, Encryption, GitLab, Hosting, HTML, HTTPS/TLS security, Infrastructure, Internet, Internet protocol suite, Let's Encrypt (letsencrypt/certbot), Power User, Software Development, Source Code Management, TCP, TLS, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

capitaltg/thea: Certificate Checker and https://certchecker.app site

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/05/03

[Wayback/Archive.is] capitaltg/thea: Certificate Checker

Certificate Checker provides an easy-to-use solution to check certificates, certificate chains, and TLS configurations. To run Certificate Checker for publicly-accessible web sites you can go to: https://certchecker.app and enter in there a URL to check.
Users can easily run Certificate Checker in an internal network to validate or troubleshoot their TLS configuration. To run it on a local network you can run the Docker image as described below. You can also build the application and deploy it on an existing server.

It runs on [Wayback/Archive.is] Certificate Checker.

I used it to check various certificates and chains, including those for my GitHub Pages explained last week in Setting up a GitHub project so it is served over https as a custom subdomain.

–jeroen

Posted in Communications Development, Development, Encryption, HTTPS/TLS security, Internet protocol suite, Let's Encrypt (letsencrypt/certbot), Power User, Security, Software Development, TCP, TLS, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Setting up a GitHub project so it is served over https as a github.io and a custom subdomain

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/04/27

Some links that helped me getting this working:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Cloud, Cloudflare, Communications Development, Development, Encryption, GitHub, HTML, HTTP, HTTPS/TLS security, Infrastructure, Internet protocol suite, Let's Encrypt (letsencrypt/certbot), Power User, Security, Software Development, Source Code Management, TCP, TLS, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Cryptosense Discovery

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/03/15

This is cool: [Wayback] Cryptosense Discovery:

Free tool that discovers security configuration errors in SSH and TLS servers and explains how to fix them. Supports STARTTLS and can also scan HTTPS, POP3, IMAP and SMTP servers.

It gives you a list of servers a target domain uses (for purposes like web, email, etc) that can have external encryption enabled, then allows you to test these.

The list by default has only servers within that target domain enabled, but you can optionally include other servers (for instance if a domain uses a third party for their SMTP handling).

Basically it is the web-counterpart of a tool like testssl.sh (which I have written about before).

Found while checking out how to test the MX security of a domain using [Wayback] testssl.sh as I forgot the syntax, which in retrospect is dead easy as per [Wayback] tls – How to use testssl.sh on an SMTP server? – Information Security Stack Exchange (thanks [Wayback] Z.T.!):

…

testssl.sh --mx <domain name>

works fine.

testssl.sh -t smtp <ip>:25

and

testssl.sh -t smtp <ip>:587

also work fine.

Note that not specifying the port assumes port 443, despite specifying protocol smtp. That doesn’t work.

…

Also, you might try discovery.cryptosense.com which does the same thing only better

That website is made by the cool people at [Wayback] Cryptosense.

Both are a lot easier than the alternatives described in [Wayback] Blog · How to test SMTP servers using the command-line · Halon MTA: using nslookup and dig for determining the affected hosts, using nc or telnet for testing basic connectivity, using [Wayback/Archive.is] openssl s_client to test TLS, and [Wayback/Archive.is] smtpping for measuring throughput.

In addition to the above tools mentioned in the blog, I’ve also used sendEmail (note case sensitivity), ehlo-size, and swaks.

This is what I tested:

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Awk, bash, bash, Communications Development, Development, DNS, Encryption, grep, HTTPS/TLS security, Internet, Internet protocol suite, Power User, Scripting, Security, SMTP, Software Development, SSH, ssh/sshd, TCP, testssl.sh, TLS | Leave a Comment »

Snowflake – help vulnerable people (like censored or in war zones) access the internet

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/28

Via [Archive] Daniël Verlaan on Twitter: “Het is lief dat mensen iets willen doen, maar dit is even “effectief” als heel vaak op je F5-knop drukken. Als je zonder technische kennis mee wil helpen, draai een Tor Snowflake zodat Oekraïners en Russen toegang blijven houden tot een vrij internet: …” / Twitter:

[Wayback/Archive] Snowflake

Snowflake is a system to defeat internet censorship. People who are censored can use Snowflake to access the internet. Their connection goes through Snowflake proxies, which are run by volunteers. For more detailed information about how Snowflake works see our [Wayback/Wayback] documentation wiki.

Run a Proxy

If your internet access is not censored, you should consider installing the Snowflake extension to help users in censored networks. There is no need to worry about which websites people are accessing through your proxy. Their visible browsing IP address will match their Tor exit node, not yours.

If you would like to run a command-line version of the Snowflake proxy on your desktop or server, see our [Wayback/Archive] community documentation for running a standalone Snowflake proxy.

Use Snowflake

If your internet access is censored, you should download [Wayback/Archive] Tor Browser.

Tor Browser screenshot

–jeroen

 

Posted in Awareness, Power User, Privacy, Security | Leave a Comment »

Not sure why: graph.windows.net is missing a security certificate retraction on some Windows machines?

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/28

Got this on two Dutch Windows machines, not sure why yet:

Missing information on security certificate retraction

Missing information on security certificate retraction

Certificate path is OK

Certificate path is OK

–jeroen

Posted in Communications Development, Development, Encryption, Internet protocol suite, Power User, Security, TCP, TLS | Leave a Comment »

Bash functions to encode and decode the ‘Basic’ HTTP Authentication Scheme

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/24

IoT devices still often use the ‘Basic’ HTTP Authentication Scheme for authorisation, see [Wayback] RFC7617: The ‘Basic’ HTTP Authentication Scheme (RFC ) and [Wayback] RFC2617: HTTP Authentication: Basic and Digest Access Authentication (RFC ).

Often this authentication is used even over http instead of over https, for instance the Egardia/Woonveilig alarm devices I wrote about yesterday at  Egardia/Woonveilig: some notes about logging on a local gateway to see more detailed information on the security system. This is contrary to guidance in:

  • RFC7617:
       This scheme is not considered to be a secure method of user
   authentication unless used in conjunction with some external secure
   system such as TLS (Transport Layer Security, [RFC5246]), as the
   user-id and password are passed over the network as cleartext.
  • RFC2617:
       "HTTP/1.0", includes the specification for a Basic Access
   Authentication scheme. This scheme is not considered to be a secure
   method of user authentication (unless used in conjunction with some
   external secure system such as SSL [5]), as the user name and
   password are passed over the network as cleartext.

Fiddling with those alarm devices, I wrote these two little bash functions (with a few notes) that work both on MacOS and in Linux:

# `base64 --decode` is platform neutral (as MacOS uses `-D` and Linux uses `-d`)
# `$1` is the encoded username:password
function decode_http_Basic_Authorization(){
  echo $1 | base64 --decode
  echo
}

# `base64` without parameters encodes
# `echo -n` does not output a new-line
# `$1` is the username; `$2` is the password
function encode_http_Basic_Authorization(){
  echo $1:$2 | base64
}

The first decodes the <credentials> from a Authorization: Basic <credentials> header into a username:password clean text followed by a newline.

The second one encodes a pair of username and password parameters into such a <credentials> string.

They are based on these initial posts that were not cross platform or explanatory:

  1. [Wayback] Decode HTTP Basic Access Authentication – Stack Pointer
  2. [Wayback] Create Authorization Basic Header | MJ’s Web Log

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apple, Authentication, bash, bash, Communications Development, Development, HTTP, Internet protocol suite, Linux, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Scripting, Security, Software Development, TCP, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Google Open Source Insights (hopefully by now more than just npm/golang/maven)

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/02/02

Interesting project at [Wayback] Open Source Insights

Open Source Insights is an experimental project by Google.

Hopefully by now it is supporting more than just npm/golang/maven and by the time it sunsets, other projects take over.

The introduction was some 9 months ago: [Wayback] Introducing the Open Source Insights Project | Google Open Source Blog

Via:

–jeroen

Posted in Development, Go (golang), JavaScript/ECMAScript, Node.js, Power User, Scripting, Security, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

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