Security-Protocols

Nine Inch Nails is giving away their new album for free entitled The Slip, exclusively from NiN.com. The album is available in a variety of formats including high-quality MP3, FLAC and or M4A lossless at CD quality and even higher-than-CD quality 24/96 WAVE.

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I finally got around to posting the shots I took while I was in Vancouver, British Columbia for CanSecWest 2008. This was my first time going to CanSecWest and I must say it was a great conference. It doesn’t have all of that hype and BS like BlackHat does.. Ill defiantly be going next year.

Full photo set here:
http://flickr.com/photos/tomferris/sets/72157604376917452/

I have been waiting to see when someone was going to do something like this.

Nick Breese, a senior security consultant at Auckland-based Security-assessment.com, has come up with a way to drastically increase the processing capability of cracking passwords, using a PS3.

By implementing common ciphers and hash functions using vector computing, Breese has pushed the current upper limit of 10–15 million cycles per second — in Intel-based architecture — up to 1.4 billion cycles per second.

Breese, who has been working on the project, called “Crackstation”, for the past six months, used the Sony PlayStation 3 gaming console for his break-through research. PS3’s Cell Broadband Engine technology was created by IBM, Toshiba and Sony. The companies collaborated to create the CBE, commonly known as Cell, processor, which consists of one scalar processor and eight vector processors.

Source: PC World

So after installing the latest version of Parallels my Cisco VPN client broke and would give the following error on launch:

Error 51: Unable to communicate with the VPN subsystem.
Please make sure that you have at least one network interface that is currently active and has an IP address and start this application again.

I tried uninstalling Parallels and reinstalling the VPN client, still no go. After doing some digging around, I found out how to fix the problem so I figured I would post it since im probably not the only one having this issue.

First launch terminal.app and execute the following:


$ ifconfig -a

fw0: flags=8863 mtu 2030
inet 169.254.30.140 netmask 0xffff0000 broadcast 169.254.255.255
lladdr 00:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx
media: autoselect status: inactive
supported media: autoselect


I have removed the rest of the details, but what we are interested in is fw0. What is fw0? Well its the firewire ethernet interface. Also, if you dont see fw0 yours might be fw1.

So then execute:

$ sudo ifconfig fw0 down

Now try launching your Cisco VPN client, it should work. If you would like to have fw0 disabled on boot, do the following below:

$ sudo pico /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN


Then change the StartService() function to the following:


StartService ()
{
#disable fw0
/sbin/ifconfig fw0 down

if [ -d $CISCO_VPN_DIR ]; then
ConsoleMessage "Starting Cisco Systems VPN Driver"
kextload $CISCO_VPN_DIR
fi
}