I recently forked twisted-socks to add SOCKS 5 support for my GoogleScraper in order to scraper Google pages asynchronously. Obviously I needed SOCKS5 support to anonymize the parallel requests such that I can scrape more pages simultaneously.

I tested the code for SOCKS4 and SOCKS4a with a local TOR proxy and twistd -n socks and the SOCKS5 protocol with the dante socks proxy server on my VPS. So I guess the basic functionality should be working by now. GSSAPI (Kerberos) support is planned.

Here is the socksclient code, which is also available on my github repository:

# Copyright (c) 2011-2013, The Tor Project
# See LICENSE for the license.

# Updated on 25.01.14-28.01.14 to add SOCKS 5 support.
# Cleaned some parts of the code and abstracted quite a bit to handle the most important SOCKS5
# functionality like
# - username/password authentication
# - gssapi authentication (planned)
# - CONNECT command (the normal case, there are others: UDP ASSOCIATE and BIND, but they aren't as important. Maybe I will add them
#   in the future. If anyone wants to implement them, the basic structure is already here and the SOCKSv5ClientProtocol should be
#   rather easy extensible (how the actual connection, listening for incoming connections (BIND) and …

Table of contents

1. Preface: Giving first insight into the idea and why I think that hooking into a browser is a good idea.
2. Many different ways to make browser game bots: Discussion various techniques to write HTTP/WebSocket bots
3. How does chess.com internally look like?: Investigation of the client side behavior of chess.com
4. How the bot works: Explaining how my shared library hooks firefox network functions
5. Conclusion: Summary of my discoveries
6. Demo Video and another, better demo video: You might only watch that video, but make sure you read the explanation on the very bottom of this blog post!
7. You may find the sources to the shared library (so) on my github account.

Preface

Usually I don't have good ideas in forms of flashes of genius. On the contrary, I think that many endeavors and interesting projects might be reasonable if realized, but often so, there's a huge amount of work involved and too many variables and strategic decisions in the process that could eventually render the project a failure. What I try to say: A mediocre idea well engineered might be a good product. But a good idea badly implemented and designed is usually just bad in …

Preface

This post is about general security weaknesses in wordpress plugins, that allow malicious attackers to gain code execution access on the web server (which is quite often the user www-data). To outline the problem shortly: Often, wordpress plugins need a administration form to handle settings and options. These options are meant to be exclusively alterable by the admin of the wordpress site. But unfortunately, lots of wordpress plugins suffer from a very dangerous combination of CSRF and stored XSS vulnerabilities, that wrapped up in a social engineering approach, may break the site.

I have done some research in the past about such attacks. You can read about a stored xss in flash album gallery plugin as well as my findings about a similar flaw in the wp members plugin.

How does the attack vector look like?

First we need to understand how administration menus are created in wordpress, because these forms are the point where data flows into a application. You can learn more about the underlying concept on wordpress codex.

But the crucial point to understand is, that they all consist of forms, independently of the fact that you can pack your options under a predefined and already …

What

I just rummaged through my old hard disk and suddenly stumbled across some old C sources from around a year ago when I played with IAT hooking on windows 7. I will not explain much, but I made the bottom code around a year ago (Thus, in 2012) and it should be able to hook any code (depicted as the handler here) into running processes via the IAT. I suppose the code is not working properly, but it gives a good picture of how an IAT hooking approach might look like.

What'll you do?

Hopefully I'll find some time and motivation (or more appropriate: discipline) to update the little library and finally complete it. Maybe I will also make it compatible with windows 8, but I assume it's not really different from windows 7 (Hell I don't know anything about the windows API)...

#include "main.h"

/* 
 * Implements a little library to Hook the WinApi on running programs.
 * Furthermore, the API provides functions too find code caves and little hook templates for the most common scenarios
 * when we use hooking: Intercept function parameters and monitor output...
 * Supports both, 32 and 64 bit Windows XP to Windows 7. The code is …

Preface

Do you like to fiddle around with programming projects in your spare time? And do you sometimes start endeavors ambitiously, but you never actually finish them? Are you fucking tired of stacking unsuccessful projects, doing mediocre work while never being thoroughly satisfied in what you do?

If yes, you may be inclined to listen to some words I have to say over my most recent failed project:

The idea was to create my own little captcha plugin for wordpress. You can learn more about the idea by delving into some of my accompanying investigations in the following blog posts:

• Plotting Bézier curves directly and with De Casteljau’s algorithm
• Create your own font the hard way!

Honestly I started this project because back in the time I was using this plugin and I was unsatisfied because for these reason. So this context information hopefully points out some of my motivations to start the project in the first place.

The destiny of every badly planned project

As with many spontaneously started projects in came up with in the past, I first was convinced that it was an awesome idea and subsequently started programming head-first without having a clear path or …

If you are a programmer, you sometimes find yourself in the need for random numbers. There are many possible use cases:

• Generate data for unit-tests.
• Build secure passwords or keys as input for ciphers like AES, Twofish and its colleagues.
• Simulating the real world for modelling applications.
• A prominent use case: Lot's of gambling sites depend on good random number generators.

Now if you code in PHP, there are quite some different ways to obtain random numbers. There is the rand ( int $min , int $max ) function for instance: It yields a random number within the range specified by the $min and $max parameters.

The documentation states that this approach isn't particularly secure and shouldn't be used for applications that need to feed algorithms with cryptographically secure random data. Then there's mt_rand ( int $min , int $max ) that apparently creates better random values. Certainly not suitable for crypto purposes as well.
There were/are quite some applications concerned with security bugs because of using rand() or mt_rand() for passwords, encryption keys, session cookies, CSRF tokens and the like. See also this link to a related discussion on security.stackexchange.com.

But because of convenience of the $min, $max interfaces of rand() and …