Recent Posts

Solving Dakotacon 2015 RE C2 challenge with Angr

Background The motivation my last entry was to provide an easier way for me, and others, to learn more about (and use!) Angr. Well, I’ve finally had some time to play around with Angr, and I’ve been able to use it to solve two CTF challenges (as of now – I’m still working on some others!): One is the C2 challenge from the Dakotacon 2015 RE challenge, and the other is the first challenge of the 2016 FLARE-ON CTF.

Eye of Jupyter: Angr iPython Notebooks in Sandstorm

EDIT (11/1/16): Well, Eye of Jupyter is now on the Sandstorm appstore, and is now simply called Angr Binary Reverse-Engineering! Many thanks to Asheesh Laroia for suggesting I publish it, and guiding me along the way. At the suggestion of a friend, I decided to take a look into integrating Angr into Jupyter. Of course, I checked to see if there happened to be a Jupyter Sandstorm app, and there is.

Using Piwik for Web Analytics in Sandstorm (with a HAProxy reverse proxy!)

But first: Why?? None of that crappy Google Analytics spam bot stuff. Look at all these fake referers (this is a screenshot of my Google Analytics page): Interestingly, some of those hits showed up even after I removed Google Analytics from my blog… Anyway, not a single bot or sketchy referer has showed up in my Piwik analytics. My guess is that the bot writers haven’t deemed it worthwhile to go after Piwik users – at least not yet.

Critical workarounds/fixes for suspend/resume & screen flickering on XPS 9550 running Arch Linux

EDIT (12/1/2016): Dell has released BIOS version 1.2.16, and it appears to remedy the black screen on resume from suspend! After getting my first display replaced under warranty due to dead/stuck pixels, I still had issues with screen brightness and random flickering. I updated to the latest BIOS (which was, at the time of this writing, version 01.2.10), which promised to “Fix LCD flickering when in lowest brightness”. Unfortunately, it did not reduce, much less fix, the flickering on my system… and it actually introduced a new problem: upon resuming from a suspend, the screen’s backlight would not come on, unless the brightness was turned up all the way.

Dell XPS 15 9550 Arch Linux Trackpad Multitouch Clicks and Gestures with libinput (and i3-wm)

EDIT (1/24/2017): I’ve switched to Wayland and sway on my 9550, but I still use libinput-gestures for trackpad gestures. However, my libinput-gestures config has changed slightly to accomodate sway. You can see the always-up-to-date version here! By cobbling together a few different pieces and projects, we are able to get some basic gestures working on the Dell XPS 15 9550 trackpad, including: 2-finger vertical and horizontal scrolling 2- and 3-finger clicking 3- and 4- finger swiping In this post we will cover the steps necessary to enable these gestures on the trackpad.

pfSense VLANs with a one-NIC NUC & a TP-LINK TL-SG108E

EDIT (01/01/2019): Here’s a link to forum thread with a newer/updated version of the Realtek Gigabit NIC driver mentioned below, which you’ll need if you’re running a recent version of pfSense. Happy New Year! EDIT (11/26/2017): We recently upgraded to Gigabit FIOS, and the driver for the Realtek NIC inside the Intel NUC BOX6CAYH would crash periodically when it experienced sustained, relatively high (200Mbps+) throughput – the message I saw in the kernel logs was something like re0: watchdog timeout.