My name is Philipp C. Heckel and I write about nerdy things.

Posts Tagged / Hacking


  • May 04 / 2015
  • 3
Linux, Programming, Security

OpenSSH ‘AuthorizedKeysCommand’ with ‘fingerprint’ argument (Patch for OpenSSH 6.6p1)

Many of us developers or system administrators use OpenSSH’s public key authentication (aka password-less login) on a daily basis. The mechanism works based on public key cryptography: By adding a RSA/DSA public key to the authorized_keys file, the user with the matching private key can login without a password. The mechanism works great for a couple of hundred, thousands and even 100k thousand users (tested, login takes ~2sec).

But what if there are more keypairs, say, a million users, or a more flexible approach is desired? Maybe with an LDAP or a database backend? Think of GitHub and how they do their ssh git@github.com ... login! This blog post shows you how to do that by patching OpenSSH’s AuthorizedKeysCommand option to support an additional fingerprint argument.

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  • Mar 22 / 2015
  • 2
Uncategorized

Circumvent Internet blockages/filters/censorship with socksproxy and netcat

These days, ISPs are often forced to block the access to certain sites, because their government considers these sites dangerous and/or illegal. While one could certainly discuss the usefulness of such measures in great detail, this tiny post focuses on the more interesting subject of how to circumvent these blockages. It’s not a lenghty post, and it doesn’t show all the ways there are, but I’ll show two simple ways to circumvent Internet non-DNS-based filters.

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  • Aug 04 / 2013
  • 59
Security

Use SSLsplit to transparently sniff TLS/SSL connections – including non-HTTP(S) protocols

I recently demonstrated how to perform a man-in-the-middle attack on HTTP(S) connections using mitmproxy. While mitmproxy works just great for HTTP-based communication, it does not understand other TLS/SSL-based traffic such as FTPS, SMTP over SSL, IMAP over SSL or any other protocol wrapped in TLS/SSL.

SSLsplit is a generic transparent TLS/SSL proxy for performing man-in-the-middle attacks on all kinds of secure communication protocols. Using SSLsplit, one can intercept and save SSL-based traffic and thereby listen in on any secure connection.

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  • Jul 05 / 2013
  • 62
Android, Mobile, Security

How To: Sniff the WhatsApp password from your Android phone or iPhone

WhatsApp is a very popular SMS-like messenger for smartphones, but it’s unfortunately only available for smartphones right now. If you want to use other tools or write web applications that send or receive WhatsApp messages (e.g. WhatsAPI, was at https://github.com/venomous0x/WhatsAPI, site now defunct, July 2019), you have to find a way to sniff the WhatsApp password from your smartphone. Until recently, this password was just an MD5 hash of your IMEI (or MAC address), but that has changed when that was uncovered. Since then, the WhatsApp server assigns a password to each device/account when it first registers.

This tutorial demonstrates how to capture the WhatsApp password of your WhatsApp account using the SSL/TLS proxy mitmproxy. Once you have this password, you can use it to communicate with the WhatsApp servers directly or via a framework. This is the first part of a two-part tutorial. The second part demonstrates how to send and receive WhatsApp messages via PHP.

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  • Jul 01 / 2013
  • 68
Android, Linux, Security

How To: Use mitmproxy to read and modify HTTPS traffic

Capturing HTTP and HTTPS traffic on your own machine is quite simple: Using tools like Wireshark or Firebug, sniffing the local connections is only a matter of seconds. Capturing and/or altering the HTTP/HTTPS traffic of other machines in your network (such as your smartphone or other laptops) on the other hand is not so easy. Especially sniffing into SSL-secured HTTPS-connections seems impossible at first. Using mitmproxy, however, makes this possible in a very easy and straight forward way.

This small tutorial shows how to use mitmproxy to transparently sniff into and alter (!) HTTPS connections of your phone or other devices in your network.

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  • Mar 01 / 2011
  • 43
Uncategorized

Hacking Flash Applications and Games: A Case Study

Adobe’s proprietary Flash format has become a significant part of the Internet as it is today. While its importance in Web applications is slowly decreasing due to Web 2.0 technologies and HTML5, it is still a major player in the browser game and application sector. The majority of these games and applications are for entertainment only and offer you nothing but a nice rank in the high score. On rare occasions, however, there are Flash games in which you can actually win something valuable such as concert tickets or even money. And of course there are applications that let you stream, but not download content from a website.

So what’s the problem with that, you think? The problem is that almost all Flash applications can be hacked very easily and most developers are not aware of that.

As a reminder of how vulnerable Flash applications are, this post aims to raise awareness for these issues. In a case study, it shows how a Flash-based game and its server side high score can be tricked within a few minutes using free tools only.

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