Centroid.EU Blog

(this blog is mostly encrypted - adults only)

An intergalactic puzzle

July 12th, 2009

I read NASA's APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) and if you click on the link you'll see todays picture which is a message to aliens. I wanted to see just how easy it is so I started deciphering it. First it lists numbers in quantity represented as dots then it shows the binary value of the number and then a base 10 representation. These numbers go from 0 to 10 (with binary as well) and continue in base ten with 10,11, 12, 14, 15 and 20. At the top then is a 1 on the left side and a 1 on the right side in binary, possibly indicating our sexes (with five spots possibly indicating our fingers on each hand). Then it continues with prime numbers from 2 through 89 (so that definitely something intelligent is behind this). And then it says 2 3021377 X1 which I cannot figure out, but perhaps you can.

Hah! Google knew it was a very high prime number called a Mersenne prime. Here is it's homepage.

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Random Hackepedia

July 11th, 2009

Syslog is the common way of managing logfiles on UNIX. Processes that wish to log something write to a UNIX socket usually bound in /dev/log which then goes to syslogd that writes these logs to a file usually found in /var/log.

To read more about syslog at hackepdia go here.

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Random Hackepedia

July 4th, 2009

All users on a system have the ability to customize their environment to their taste. This can involve choosing a shell such as bash, zsh, or tcsh, setting the environment, shell aliases, or running scripts at startup. These tasks are all handled by various "profile scripts".

To read more about profiles read on.

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OpenBSD packages

July 4th, 2009

First off, I'm not a fan of packages. But I'm wrong. The economics of pre-compiled packages are better than building a package yourself. For one you don't have to run your CPU hot building a port that someone has already done for you, so you're wasting less electricity if you install the package. However I'm the type of person that wants the source code at all times so I've found a way to compromise. I put this in my /etc/mk.conf:

# more /etc/mk.conf
FETCH_PACKAGES=Yes
PKG_PATH=ftp://ftp.de.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.5/packages/i386/

So now all I have to do is go into the ports and type: make fetch (gets the source) and make install (gets the package and installs it). This way I have the source to fall back on when I need it and the package process is a few seconds at most.

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The xlog is discontinued

July 2nd, 2009

Some people must have gotten hold of an old cache of my blog from 2006/2007 where I offered blog articles in encrypted form. You could order a decrypt CD then to decrypt what was written, however noone at the time was interested. I discontinued offering the blog in encrypted form and no sales were made. I found some bounce mails from people today writing in to the decrypt mailbox (which doesn't exist anymore). Thanks for your interests but the offer is over.

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Natally does AES

June 30th, 2009

Well I have been hacking away at natally the last couple weeks now and I finally got dual mode encryption into it. It now does AES as well as Blowfish encryption. Because of the nature of the code it should be easy now to add other ciphers now too, it just needs to be put in place. I started out with blowfish and then coded my way to AES removing a lot of hard code such as blocksizes which need to be dynamic with multiple ciphers. I'm thinking perhaps I should write a manpage now (ughh) or something.

PS: with revision 50 I committed the NAT state expiration code which was needed to complete this project. Perhaps it'll need a bit of tweaking here and there but the main code is finished.

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Random Hackepedia

June 26th, 2009

If you want to use a sniffer to watch dhcp requests, replace rl0 with your NIC:

To read more about dhcpd read on.

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Random Hackepedia

June 21st, 2009

A Fifo is a named pipe. It is used for IPC. It is created with the mkfifo syscall or command. Fifos reside in the filesystem and require a process to read from it while another process writes to it.

To read more about fifo, go to Hackepedia.

PS: Happy Solstice 6/2009!

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OpenSSL speed

June 21st, 2009

I participated in the Deschall (sp) crack challenge back in 97 or so and the DES cipher was broken by a supercomputer especially built for the task. So now it's 12 years later and a lot has happened. DES was replaced by AES and AES is a lot more secure the literatures write.

But I'm left wondering why the dickens AES is a faster cipher than DES. Pretend you are brute forcing a cipher, wouldn't then a faster cipher produce more attempts per second than a slower cipher? This means a brute force would end sooner to exhaust a cryptogram. Hmm. Here are some stats of DES and AES that I cut from an "openssl speed" command on my home computer.

The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
des cbc          19981.67k    26454.32k    27109.93k    27133.40k    26813.16k
des ede3          9693.15k     9656.40k     9351.31k     9793.71k     9824.77k
blowfish cbc     35115.53k    41062.07k    39941.05k    41949.41k    41771.29k
aes-128 cbc      33001.89k    51473.35k    60324.97k    66089.46k    63121.28k
aes-192 cbc      30109.43k    46625.91k    51426.45k    54773.53k    56143.75k
aes-256 cbc      34359.02k    42632.24k    47491.13k    47512.66k    46742.06k

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HOME

June 19th, 2009

Yesterday I found this movie on youtube and it touched me. It basically warned humanity once again of our ways and said in 10 years the disruption of the harmony of life will be irreversible. The movie has some great footage from all over the world, check it out.