Recent events have made me reflect on a few things in my life I was already thinking about for a while. Also, responses on social media have made me realize that people have strange expectations from me, and what my role in the Bitcoin Core project is.

I’ve put up a (read-only) mirror of various bitcoin-related git repositories at nxshomzlgqmwfwhcnyvbznyrybh3gotlfgis7wkv7iur2yj2rarlhiad.onion. This is a Tor v3 hidden service, which means that at least Tor 0.3.2.9 is required to access it.

Being able to run tests quickly is essential during development. As a maintainer I end up running the test suite several dozens of times per day. Recently I noticed that the functional tests (test/functional/test_runner.py) are slow when run inside a qemu VM (with KVM).

In this post I’m going to describe my ongoing experiment of porting Bitcoin Core to CloudABI. I think the capability-based approach of CloudABI is a conceptually great way of going about the problem of containing applications, and it might be a harbinger of things to come in computer security. Bitcoin Core is a good example of an existing, moderately complex, security critical C++ application to port over.

Here I’ve taken the environment from the BLATSTING Command-and-Control protocol article and extended it, so that the emulator works as a router between an internal network with our victim and an external network, a mock version of the internet with just our attacker and one web server:

SECONDDATE is the most well-known of the spy toys in the EQGRP dump. It is a Man-in-the-Middle attack tool that is installed on intermediate routes. It can be used to fake DNS replies as well as inject HTTP redirects. This intercept article does a great job of explaining the operational side.

Among BLATSTING’s modules is one named crypto_rsa. According to the name one’d expect it to implement the well-known asymmetric cryptosystem going under that name.

This time I will be taking a cursory look at a different malware framework in the EQGRP free dump: BUZZDIRECTION. BUZZDIRECTION is another modular rootkit, but more extensive than BLATSTING. This list classifies it as “a firewall software implant for Fortigate firewalls”, just like BLATSTING. Maybe it is just a successor for the same purpose, but maybe it is something more.

This showterm session shows a transcript of a session controlling BLATSTING.

I’ve finally imported the posts from my old blog on blog.visucore.com, so that I can retire it and make it a redirect here. I’ve carefully tried to keep the slugs the same so that content will appear in the same place. This was partially manual work. Some links and formatting may be broken, either during the process or due to bit rot over time (the oldest posts are from 2010!). Let me know (or submit a pull request on github) if this is the case…