As a lot of people I just created an account on twitter ! Let see !
Monday 4 May 2009
NTLMSSP 2
By mat on Monday 4 May 2009, 21:35
No it's not the sequel of a film, just an updated version of /public/Download/patchs/patch_ntlm_040509 patch for wireshark. This version add the following updates
- Support for DCE/RPC with direct NTLMSSP auth
- Support for DCE/RPC with SPNEGO with NTLM auth mechanism
I also started to work on the verfier verification (sic) but it didn't work for DCE/RPC (I didn't get the right HMAC MD5), and I need also to find a way to update information into wireshark to reflect the fact that MD5 (and also NT challenge also in case no good password can be found).
Saturday 2 May 2009
Xerox 7232 & Samba : Veni Vidi Vici
By mat on Saturday 2 May 2009, 00:35
Well almost ! Last week I've been chasing down problem(s) that prevented this printer to work with samba, or more exactly to be served through samba print server. It's reported here, if you look at the first comment you'll find some idea for the workaround.
Basically the idea is to setup a printer locally give it the same shared name as the one on server, then export the entry into .reg file, then you define the driver for the printer on the server it will generate some error messages but you can ignore them. Then open the server registry (through a XP workstation for instance), load your exported registry entry into server registry, safely ignore error message.
Et voilà you can enjoy your shared printer on a samba server !
Saturday 25 April 2009
Patch for NTLMSPP auth mechanism
By mat on Saturday 25 April 2009, 18:00
I'm quite proud to produce here my first real patch for an opensource project: Wireshark.
The attached patch allow to decode LDAP traffic encoded using NTLMSSP scheme. Even if now kerberos tends to be more and more used for authentification and encryption (through GSSAPI), NTLM and NTLMSSP mechanism is still used frequently by Microsoft products (either as a fallback when kerberos is unavailable, or as the only secure choice like SPA mode in outlook).
So I think that this patch will definitly be useful to others.
The patch is attached to this entry ! (see bellow)
Sunday 15 March 2009
Creating LDAP account in Outlook
By mat on Sunday 15 March 2009, 19:19 - MSNightmare
I spent a few hours to improve this script to allow creation of multiple LDAP entries with login and password. The result is here: addldap.vbs. It fix some flaws of the previous scripts such as:
- only one ldap account
- user has a popup on next outlook startup
It works perfectly with anonymous LDAP, but setting a password do not work very well: you can pass an array representing the password obtained by a manual setup.
But It will only work with this account because the password is encoded using DPAPI which use the user personal key to encrypt the data. Trying to deploy this to other user will badly fails (as outlook will find the whole ldap account broken).
There is a way to mitigate this problem: when using SPA authentication outlook will firt use the credential of the logged user before those supplied in the account creation (if they are different). So if you want to have a non anonymous access to LDAP and what the logged user to provide his credential you just have to call the script and supply the username, an empty array as password and set doSPA parameter to 1.
I also discovered that unlike email accounts, LDAP accounts do not prompt the user when the password is wrong. Which reduce the number of prompt the user receive when a password has expired.
At the end the only two cases where this script is useless are:
- accessing an LDAP with a generic account
- accessing an LDAP that do not support SPA (aka NTLM authentication)
I guess those case are pretty rare (well I hope)
Sunday 19 October 2008
Putting all together
By mat on Sunday 19 October 2008, 20:07 - l4sus
I have been busy last weeks making L4SUS more friendly or at least less complicated !
I am quite happy of what I acheived so far. As the title says I put everything together to make a real install guide and some documentation.
All of this is the 0.1 release you will need the zip and the tar file because it was easier to package one for windows and the other one for Unix/Linux/....
Enjoy !
Saturday 11 October 2008
Fighting with call progress tones
By mat on Saturday 11 October 2008, 17:08
If you are like me a happy owner of any sippura (or now linksys spa) ata device and you are not living in US, then configuring the regional part of the device can be complicated. Especially the "Call Progress Tones" part.
First you have to know that the real important part is the following tones:
- Dial Tone
- Second Dial Tone
- Outside Dial Tone
- Prompt Tone
- Busy Tone
- Reorder Tone
- Off Hook Warning Tone
- Ring Back Tone
All this tones use a rule with the following syntax:
freq1@db_level1,freq2@db_level2,...,freqn@db_leveln; num_seconds(frequency_sequence1,frequency_sequence2,...,frequency_sequencen)
With frequency_sequence with this syntax:
num_seconds_on/num_seconds_off/frequencies
With this explainations 480@-19,620@-19;10(.5/.5/1+2) is quite simple to
understand it is a signal of two frequencies :
480Hz and 620Hz both at -19dB during 10 seconds both frequencies (due to 1+2)
will be played with this rhythm: half of second (.5) on and half of second
off.
This more complicated one:
985@-16,1371@-16,1777@-16;*(.380/0/1,.274/0/2,.380/0/3,0/4/0) consists of 3
frequencies:
985Hz, 1371Hz and 1777Hz all at -16dB they will played forever (until status
change for instance ...) with the following rhythm: 985Hz during 0,380 seconds
then 1371Hz during 0,274 seconds then 1777Hz for 0,380 and finally no tone
during 4 seconds.
If you are searching for the frequency for your country indications.conf from asterisk is your friend.
Thursday 4 September 2008
Fighting spam part 1: Spamtrap
By mat on Thursday 4 September 2008, 19:58 - Spam
Why do we need to train the filter
Bayesian filters use a statistical approach to classify emails, in order to make it works you need to train the filter at the beginning with both know spam and not spam (ham) emails so that the filter knows which events are statistically present in spam emails and which are not. This is often done by the administrator (otherwise the bayesian part is not activated in most filters) but the day to day training is not so often done and not so well which leads to reduced filter efficiently as time goes by.
But in fact it's very important that the filter stays up to date with new spam messages so that it can gather new hints of spams and stays at the top. If the filter is not usually fed continuously with new spam messages it's because the task is not so easy.
Tuesday 2 September 2008
Fighting spam part 0: Introduction
By mat on Tuesday 2 September 2008, 15:42 - Spam
I am about to write a few articles about not so bad technics to fight efficiently spam, along the past years I developped some technics to fight spam. The latest ones seems to provide a high ratio in term of efficiency it means high quantity of spam catched and almost no false positive. I started developping this for my own personnal domain and due to my current job expand and enhance this for the company where I work for.
At the beginning it was quite simple because for my personnal use, I work with thunderbird and it includes since a long time a very good spam filter which require not so much trainning before achieving a very good filter quality and so I didn't worried much about the quality of filtering done right on the server by the SPAM filter.
But, alas, thunderbird (as many other opensource project btw) is not corporate enougth and we are stuck with outlook ... The Junk filter of the latest is rather complicated and rather unusefull. So if you want to reduce the cries of the users about SPAM you have to find a good solution on the server.
The technics that I'll present are built around spamassassin and bayesian filtering, that's not revolutionnary technologies but with a fairly good (and not complicated) and quick tuning you can acheive a very good result.
It might seems unlogical (and it is a little bit) but I'll start this serie by an article on how to train automaticaly an already running spam filter based on bayesian filtering, article about how to setup it will follow but a bit later. My reason for this is that there is tons of guides on Internet on how to setup bayes in spamassassin, whereas articles on how to train it (without the help of the standard users feedback) are rare.
Monday 23 June 2008
Microsoft my worst nightmare part 1.
By mat on Monday 23 June 2008, 20:26 - MSNightmare
Intro
It is going to be a long story with a high number of sequels it seems.
I must confess that I do not have a high esteem for Microsoft products in general but my day work force me to use them or at least support user using it and more often than not I face real stupidity in the product.
Right now my key target is Outlook from Office 2003 edition.
Using Outlook, so remove Outlook Express ?
Well it might seems logical that if you know for sure that you will use Outlook then you won't need Outlook express. If you were ready like me to remove this component with image creation tools like nlite I should not recommend you to do so !
Why ? because if you do so and try to access to a IMAP/POP3 server, it will not work because you'll need registered DLL that comes with Outlook Express and could not be provided by Outlook. Sounds good ! I spend a few hours last week on this and find no way real way to escape ! (copying DLL failed because they need to be registered, copying + trying to register with regsrv32 failed on registration, reinstallation of Outlook failed). Don't get me wrong I didn't say that you can't manage is some situation to manage to register or install outlook (especially if you do not have installed security fixes but you might run into troubles.
There must be a good reason for this, and I can understand that maybe Microsoft guys wanted to mutualise code between two versions, cool good idea, but when you install Office if one or more DLL is missing then setup should install it and do what ever is needed so that thoses DLL will be installed and registered !
Sunday 22 June 2008
L4SUS update
By mat on Sunday 22 June 2008, 20:50 - l4sus
My first public release included some bugs.
I just release right now the version 0.02, it fixes lots of typo in my first release.
The whole system is pretty stable now, but it rely on automation both on the client and the server so now it's time to move on something else:
- Create installer for windows using something like nsis so that simple configuration and scheduled tasks can be created automaticaly
- See with OCS Ng what can be done to go further in the automation
- Use offline database wsusscn2.cab to save bandwith when checking for updates (at least as an option)
- Dig more deeply in the documentation of WSUS API in order to have more informations about updates.
The lastest version is here
To be continued ...
Sunday 1 June 2008
L4SUS
By mat on Sunday 1 June 2008, 21:04 - l4sus
From the theory to practice there is a huge gap use to say my teachers.
Well I faced them well trying for real the script described here in short every thing was mostly but in order to get something that is really exploitable more efforts were needed.
Now it's done and I packaged every thing in the zipfile attached to this post. This is mostly 3 scripts (and a few subscripts) bundled together, it require a samba server. I called this L4SUS and it stands for Linux For Server Update Service.
Using L4SUS should be quite simple:
- Extract all .vbs script in a folder on each computer you want to manage updates
- Rename updatelist.conf.example to updatelist.conf and adapt configuration (ie. the name of the samba server and the root path serving update)
- Install perl script in the samba server, make it executable (chmod a+x) and adapt paths at the top of the script ($dest_base_dir and $update_file_dir)
- Verify that Windows update is configurated to search (and only search) from udpates
- On the samba server create a directory called files in the directory pointed by $dest_base_dir, and for each computer a directory of the name of the computer also is the directory pointed by $dest_base_dir
The most tricky part is that $dest_base_dir (in download_winupdate) must be exported as the value of filePath (in updatelist.conf).
Main components of this systems are :
- getupdatelist.vbs, this script search for applicable updates on the computer where it is running, it create a file in its own folder called yyyymmddproposedupdate.log which contains a list of all updates, their id and their file's url.
- download_winupdate, provide a computer name to this script and it will parse the latest proposedupdate.log file, then download missing updates files and create a command list:: upatelist which indicate to doupdates.vbs how to do the updates
- doupdates.vbs, this script execute as most quietly as possible the different updates listed in updatelist
You can get a nearly automatic systems by scheduling the scripts via cron and windows scheduler. Of course in this case it does mostly the same as using directly windows update (well it should use less bandwidth but it seems not as clever as windows update when it comes to do all the updates quietly ...).
Expect more updates soon, because it still a bit rough and should need more polish.
Sunday 18 May 2008
Listing Windows Updates for fun ... and profit
By mat on Sunday 18 May 2008, 19:29
A couple of month ago I was searching for a solution for managing windows updates (and maybe more).
Out of the box you've got two solutions :
- Standard Windows Update mechanisms
- WSUS (Windows Server Update Service)
Both were not ok for my needs in a small sized company, here are the reasons:
Standard Windows Update
When you have non IT users (which is the case of nearly every companies) you must enable automatic updates.
Main drawbacks of this methods is that you don't control which updates are installed and which are not and each computers download a copy from internet which is inefficient and a pure waste of bandwidth and could even be a big problems when the size of company grow beyond a few tens of users.
WSUS
WSUS is a good solution from Microsoft to address the problems of standard update.
You setup the service and it will manage to find available updates, then you select the one you want and they will be downloaded. On the client you just have to change the address of the update server to point to your own update server and voilà everything is working !
But It oblige you to have a Windows 2000 or 2003 server and I really hate the strategy of lock down done by Microsoft.
As both solutions didn't suits my needs, I started looking for others. I found LSUS which is available into Samba-edu as it is an opensource project, I am pretty sure that it is quite easy to extract the LSUS part but I decided not to investigate more in this way.
At this moment I decided to investigate different solution and through Windows Update API manage to have something even not complete. The script listupdates.vbs is this result. This script for the moment just output the name and the url for the different updates, but it should not be very difficult to add the missing parts.