Saturday, April 29, 2017

OpenSSL on Linux Terminal for Cryptography

OpenSSL is the most important library we will be using if we are to use some cryptographic functions on a Linux computer. There are hundreds of variations of cryptographic algorithms and related functions are available on Linux terminal with OpenSSL. In this post, I would like to note down few useful things we can do with OpenSSL library on Linux.

Base64 Encoding:

When dealing with various files and data types, sometimes it is useful to convert everything into text format. Base64 is an encoding technique which we can use to convert different data into text format and then decode from text format to the original format. Let's see how we can do it.

First of all, let's select an image file in jpg format. We are going to encode this image file in base64 format as follows.

cat old-house.jpg | openssl enc -base64 >> encoded-image.jpg

Now, it you try to open the encoded image file, you will see that you cannot open in as a usual image file. However, the nice thing is, you can open the encoded image file using a text editor because the content is printable characters now. Let's decode the encoded image file back to the original format.

cat encoded-image.jpg | openssl enc -base64 -d >> decoded-image.jpg

Data Encryption Standard (DES):

DES is a little bit older data encryption algorithm which we don't have to use nowadays. Anyway, with OpenSSL library, we can use DES as follows to encrypt data.

openssl enc -des -a -in plantext.txt -out ciphertext.des

Once encrypted, we can use the following command to decrypt the data back to the plain text.

openssl enc -des -d -a -in ciphertext.des -out plaintext.tex

Advanced Encryption Standard (AES):

AES is a better and stronger encryption algorithm compared to DES. We can encrypt a file using AES and then decrypt the file back to the plain text using the following two commands.

openssl aes-256-cbc -in plaintext.txt -out ciphertext.aes

openssl aes-256-cbc -d -in ciphertext.aes -out plaintext.txt

Rivest, Shamir, Adleman (RSA):

When we are browsing web on our computer or mobile phone through a secure channel, the encryption algorithm which helps us most importantly is RSA. It is an asymmetric key encryption algorithm where we have two keys called as Public key and Private key. Private key is what we always keep to ourselves while the Public key can be distributed among everybody.

First of all, we need to generate a key pair in order to use RSA. Let's generate the private key and public key using the following two commands.

openssl genrsa -out private_key.pem 1024

openssl rsa -in private_key.pem -out public_key.pem -outform PEM -pubout

If you check the local directory where you were when running the above commands, now you should be able to see that two new files are created as private_key.pem and public_key.pem which are our keys. Now, we can encrypt data using RSA. Let's say we are going to encrypt a text file so that only a friend can see it. Then, we have to use the friend's public key during the encryption as follows.

openssl rsautl -encrypt -inkey public_key.pem -pubin -in plaintext.txt -out ciphertext.txt

Now, when your friend decrypt the cipher text, he or she should use his/her private key as follows.

openssl rsautl -decrypt -inkey private_key.pem -in ciphertext.txt -out plaintext.txt

Digital Signature of a Message:

When sending an encrypted message to someone, sometimes we need to prove that we are the person who sent the message. Just because we use RSA encryption as above, we cannot prove that we sent it. In order to prove the senders identity, we can use digital signatures. A digital signature is nothing other than just a Hash value of the original message encrypted using the private key of the sender. Since the private key of someone is always with that perform, a digital signature can be produced only by the owner of the sender's private key. We can digitally sign as follows using the RSA private key.

openssl dgst -sha256 -sign private_key.pem -out signature.txt plaintext.txt

Now, at the recipients side, he or she can verify the senders signature by decrypting the signature file using the senders public key (which is available) and then recalculate the Hash value of the original message. Following command illustrates that functionality.

openssl dgst -sha256 -verify public_key.pem -signature signature.txt plaintext.txt

There are so many things we can do with the OpenSSL library. It is up to you to explore it further.

Monday, April 24, 2017

Using Autopsy Tool for Forensic Disk Analysis

Autopsy is a web based GUI interface for the Sleuthkit forensic investigation tool kit. It can be used for interesting forensic analysis works on images acquired from storage devices. In this blog post, I'm writing the basics steps to install and use Autopsy tool to analyze a disk image.

Since the usage of a real disk image taken from somebody's storage device raises privacy concerns, I'm preparing custom disk images by manually creating filesystems on binary files. So, first of all, let's create our testing disk image.

Creating a custom disk image:

(1) Creating a file of 500MB. 

  dd if=/dev/zero of=./mydisk.img bs=1M count=500

(2) Format the file with the FAT32 file system.

    sudo mkfs.vfat -F 32 mydisk.img

(3) Mount the filesystem.

    mkdir mount-point
  sudo mount mydisk.img ./mount-point/


(4) Create a text file and add some sample content.

    sudo touch mount-point/readme.txt
  sudo vim mount-point/readme.txt


    "This is just a text file for testing purposes."

(5) Now, delete the file you created.

    sudo rm mount-point/readme.txt

(6) Unmount the filesystem.

    sudo umount mount-point/

Using Autopsy tool for disk analysis:

It's time to analyse the disk image using Autopsy tool which is the GUI frontend for the Sleuthkit.

(1) Install Autopsy tool together with Sleuthkit on a Linux machine.

    sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get install autopsy


(2) Start Autopsy with root previleges.

    sudo autopsy

(3) Now, we can access the web interface using the following URL.

    http://localhost:9999/autopsy

(4) Create a new case, a new host and finally give path to the above disk image. Once you reach the end of the creation of everything, you can see a button called "Analyze" in order to analyze the disk image.

(5) In this interface, click on the button for "File Analysis". Then you can see the files of the disk image. We can see our deleted text file in red color.



(6) In the above screen, you can see that there is a column called "META". Click the item of the deleted "readme.txt" file under this "META" column. Now you will see some meta data of the file.





(7) In the above screen, note that the file size is 47 bytes. Since the sector size of this disk image is 512 bytes, this file just resides in a single sector. That is the sector shown as "2038" in the above screenshot. Click on that sector number to view it.


 (8) On this new screen, we can view the content of the file in different formats such as ASCII and Hex.


(9) Click on the "Export Contents" button to export the deleted file and save it somewhere in your local storage.
It just saves as a raw file without the proper file extesion.

(10) We can check the file type of the exported file using various ways.

    file vol1-Sector2038.raw

(11) Let's rename the file to the correct file extension type.

    mv vol1-Sector2038.raw textfile.txt

(12) Finally, take a look at the file contents to see that is the file we created.

    cat textfile.txt

There are so many features in Autopsy tool which we can explore.

References:


[1] https://www.sleuthkit.org/autopsy/

[2] https://digital-forensics.sans.org/blog/2009/05/11/a-step-by-step-introduction-to-using-the-autopsy-forensic-browser
 

Saturday, April 22, 2017

Taking a Linux RAM Image

For various purposes such as forensic investigatins and debugging of Linux systems, we need to have a RAM image taken from a running Linux system. While there are various ways to do it, I explored an easy and interesting way using a special kernel module for Linux called LiME. I will explain the steps one by one.

(1) Download LiME

https://github.com/504ensicslabs/lime

(2) Go into the downloaded directory and compile the kernel module.

make

(3) Load the kernel module and save RAM dump to a file in one line.

sudo insmod lime-4.4.0-70-generic.ko "path=/home/asanka/Desktop/asanka-ram/mem.lime format=lime"

(4) If we want to take another RAM dump, first we have to unload the kernel module.

lsmod | grep lime
rmmod lime

 
(5) Now let's capture again but this time we use the 'raw' format.

sudo insmod lime-4.4.0-70-generic.ko "path=/home/asanka/Desktop/asanka-ram/mem.raw format=raw" 

(6) Analysis of the captured RAM image is a seperate topic. However, we can perform the most basic things with this RAM image as a start.

strings mem.raw | less
strings mem.raw | grep "key word"


References:

[1] http://forensicswiki.org/wiki/Tools:Memory_Imaging#Linux


Inspecting File Metadata using exiftool

Inspecting metadata of a file is a way to reveal so many interesting things about it. Specially, image files which are taken as pictures from cameras contains wonderful amount of information. There's a nice tool called exiftool which we can use for this purpose. I'll briefly write about how we can install it and use to inspect some files.

(1) In order to install exiftool, you can either use the package repositories or just download the source code of exiftool and build locally.

#To install using package repositories, issue to following command in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl 

#If you want to build exiftool from the source code, first you should download the code from the following place.


#Extract the downloaded compressed file and move into it.

tar xvzf Image-ExifTool-10.49.tar.gz Image-ExifTool-10.49/ 
cd Image-ExifTool-10.49/

#Compile and install the tool using the following commands.

perl Makefile.PL
make test
sudo make install

(2) It's time to inspect a file. Let's take a picture from a camera and then inspect it as follows.

exiftool file-name.jpg

The screen shot shown above illustrates the output of the exiftool ran against an image file.