Cheap Cybersecurity Books

Those into cybersecurity, rejoice.

Humble has a new book bundle and, unlike their lately book offerings, this one is actually good and extremely cheap considering the books included. Frankly, it would be a good deal if only Applied Cryptography was included.

Yes, lowest tier is useless and middle tier essentially lives on Cryptography Engineering with Mitnik’s The Art of Deception adding a bit of flair.

But the most expensive $15 tier more than makes it up with Applied Cryptography, aged book that still somehow manages to stay current in the approach to security if not in all examples. And there is Secret and Lies proving that Schneier is getting all philosophical as he ages.

Based on my picks you can already see that they might have called this Schneier’s bundle and I would be equally interested. The only two books I wish were here are Applied Cryptography and The Twofish Encryption Algorithm (yes, I know how old it is).

If you have any interest in security do think about this bundle. Probably the cheapest (legal) way to get some real classic and a good read.

My SSH Crypto Settings

With ever-expanding number of scripts on my NAS I noticed that pretty much every one had similar, but not quite the same parameters. For example, my automatic replication would use one set of encryption parameters while my Mikrotik router backup script would use other, and my website backup script would use a third variant.

So I decided to see if I could still keep the reasonable security but consolidate all these to a single type.

For key exchange, I had choice of diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256, diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha1, diffie-hellman-group14-sha1, and diffie-hellman-group1-sha1. Unfortunately there is no curve25519-sha256@libssh.org or similar algorithms that are considered more secure.

For a while I considered using diffie-hellman-group14-sha1 as it uses 2048 bit prime but its abandonment by modern SSH versions made me go with diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256. As this method allows for custom groups, it should be theoretically better but it also allows server to setup connection with known weak parameters. As servers are in my control, that should not pose an huge issue here.

For cipher my hands were extremely tied - Mikrotik, my router of choice, supports only aes256-ctr and aes192-ctr. Both are of acceptable security so I went with faster: aes192-ctr.

For authentication Mikrotik was again extremely limited - only hmac-sha2-256 and hmac-sha1 were supported. While I was tempted to go with hmac-sha1 which is still secure enough despite SHA1 being broken (HMAC part really does make a difference), I went with hmac-sha2-256 as former might get obsoleted soon.

My final set of “standard” parameters is as follows:

-2 -o KexAlgorithms=diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256 -c aes192-ctr -o MACs=hmac-sha2-256

Additional parameter is not strictly encryption related but I find it very reasonable to enforce SSH protocol version 2.

My Settings for Panasonic LX100

On these pages I cover a wide array of topics. There is no order to it - just things that interest me and problems I faced trying to make them work. More often than not, posts are just a way for me to remember solutions thinly veiled into a more generic topic.

However, some posts are so specific I cannot even pretend I am actually helping somebody else than me. This is one of those posts - my general settings for Panasonic LX100 camera. Probably of no interest to anyone, oddly specific to my way of shooting photos, and for a camera that is a bit on the old side.

PS: Panasonic also makes available online full basic and advanced manual where much more detail can be found.

Rec

Motion Picture

Custom

Setup

Playback

Custom Quick Menu

Encrypted ZFS for My Backup Machine

I already wrote about my ZFS setup. However, for my new machine I made a few changes. However, setup is still NAS4Free based.

The very first thing I forgot last time is randomizing the disks upfront. While not increasing security of new data, it does remove any old unencrypted bits you might have laying around. Even if disk is fresh, you don’t want zeros showing where your data is. Dangerous utility called dd comes handy here (once for each disk):

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/ada0 bs=1M
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/ada1 bs=1M

This takes a while but fortunately it is possible to see current progress with Ctrl+T. Do use tmux to keep session alive as this will take long time (with a big disk, more than a day is not unexpected).

Next, instead of using glabel, I decided to use the whole disk. That makes it easier to move disk later to other platform. No, I am not jumping BSD ship but I think having setup that can change environments is really handy for emergency recovery.

While ZFS can handle using device names like ada0 and ada1 and all shenanigans that come with their dynamic order, I decided to rely on serial number of drive. Normally device labels containing serial number are found under /dev/diskid/ directory. However, NAS4Free doesn’t have them on by default.

To turn them on, we go to System, Advanced, and loader.conf tab. There we add kern.geom.label.disk_ident.enable=1 and reboot. After this, we can use /dev/diskid/* for drive identification.

Those drives I then encrypt and attach each drive:

geli init -e AES-XTS -l 128 -s 4096 /dev/diskid/^^DISK-WD-WCC7KXXXXXXX^^
geli init -e AES-XTS -l 128 -s 4096 /dev/diskid/^^DISK-WD-WCC7KYYYYYYY^^

geli attach /dev/diskid/^^DISK-WD-WCC7KXXXXXXX^^
geli attach /dev/diskid/^^DISK-WD-WCC7KYYYYYYY^^

Finally, I can create the pool. Notice that I put quota around 80% of the total pool capacity. Not only this helps performance but it also prevents me from accidentally filling the whole pool. Dealing with CoW file system when it is completely full is something you want to avoid. And also, do not forget .eli suffix.

zpool create -o autoexpand=on -m none -O compression=on -O atime=off -O utf8only=on -O normalization=formD -O casesensitivity=sensitive -O quota=3T Data mirror /dev/diskid/^^DISK-WD-WCC7KXXXXXXX^^.eli /dev/diskid/^^DISK-WD-WCC7KYYYYYYY^^.eli

zdb | grep ashift
            ashift: 12

Once pool was created, I snapshotted each dataset on old machine and sent it over network. Of course, this assumes your pool is named Data, you are working from “old” machine, and new machine is at 192.168.1.2:

zfs snapshot -r ^^Data^^@Migration
zfs send -Rv ^^Data^^@Migration | ssh ^^192.168.1.2^^ zfs receive -Fs ^^Data^^

This step took a while (more than a day) as all datasets had to be recursively sent. Network did die a few times but resumable send saved my ass.

First I would get token named receive_resume_token from the destination:

zfs get receive_resume_token

And resume sending with:

zfs send -v -t ^^<token>^^ | ssh ^^192.168.1.2^^ zfs receive -Fs ^^Data/dataset^^

Unfortunately resume token does not work with recursion so each dataset will have to be separately specified from that moment onward.

Once bulk of migration was done, I shut every single service on old server. After that I took another (much smaller) snapshot and sent it over network:

zfs snapshot -r ^^Data^^@MigrationFinal
zfs send -Ri ^^Data^^@Migration ^^Data^^@MigrationFinal | ssh ^^192.168.1.2^^ zfs receive -F ^^Data^^

And that is it - shutdown the old machine and bring services up on the new one.

PS: If newly created machine goes down, it is enough to re-attach GELI disks followed by restart of ZFS daemon:

geli attach /dev/diskid/^^DISK-WD-WCC7KXXXXXXX^^
geli attach /dev/diskid/^^DISK-WD-WCC7KYYYYYYY^^
/etc/rc.d/zfs onestart

[2018-07-22: NAS4Free has been renamed to XigmaNAS as of July 2018]

Running Script Without Forking

Default way of running scripts in Linux is that shell forks new process based on hashbang (#!) found in the first line and gives rest of content to that process. And this works beautifully most of the time.

But what if we really need something found only in our current shell?

Fortunately, as long you are using bash, it is easy to run script without creating a separate shell. Just prefix it with dot (.):

./myScript

Some restrictions apply of course - the biggest gotcha being that script should be either bash or with only simple commands as content will be executed directly regardless of hash-bang (#!) specified.

PS: Yes, this works with other shells too, I use bash here as it is most common shell by far.