Decrypting GSM SMS traffic

In this post, I’ll go over how to decrypt your own 2G GSM SMS messages by pulling encryption keys off your SIM card and processing the data with gr-gsm.

In a previous post, I looked at how to decode and start analyzing GSM traffic. If you haven’t read that yet, I suggest you start there. I’m going to assume you have your environment set up to that point.

An Interactive Guide to CSS Transitions

The world of web animations has become a sprawling jungle of tools and technologies. Libraries like GSAP and Framer Motion and React Spring have sprung up to help us add motion to the DOM.

The most fundamental and critical piece, though, is the humble CSS transition. It's the first animation tool that most front-end devs learn, and it's a workhorse. Even the most grizzled, weathered animation veterans still reach for this tool often.

There's a surprising amount of depth to this topic. In this tutorial, we'll dig in and learn a bit more about CSS transitions, and how we can use them to create lush, polished animations.

SSH Certificates Security

SSH certificates, when deployed properly, improve security. A half-baked access system using certs is more vulnerable than a public-key-based one if a user or host gets [cracked].

cut & tr

This is not tutorial but here’s an example of where I used these two today. I have a bunch of docker volumes I want to list just the names of. The default output is thus: [...]

Attributes of configuration languages

Software, particularly server software or the software running on network equipment, frequently requires configuration, often provided in the form of a configuration file. No particular standard for a configuration language has ever come to dominate, so the number of configuration file formats is almost as large as the number of pieces of software needing configuration.

Many of these configuration formats lack a formal specification of their syntax or semantics and are implemented as ad-hoc parsers inside the software that consumes them. Many of these formats also appear similar to other formats but with slight differences, as inspiration for how to design configuration languages flows from one influential piece of software to another. For example, no formal specification exists for INI files, but many applications have adopted an INI-like syntax, sometimes with notable application-specific variations. The BIND nameserver's configuration format seems also to have influenced many configuration formats now used by *nix server software, again with much subtle variation.

Herein, I attempt to analyse a large number of configuration languages and discern the properties and patterns that seem to pervade all of them. Rather than focusing on syntax, which is ultimately superficial, I will focus on the semantics and data model of a given language.

It’s now easy to bypass MediaTek’s SP Flash Tool authentication

If you remember, MediaTek chipsets were previously found to be susceptible to a dangerous rootkit nearly a year ago, and it was actively exploited by hackers to gain root access. Considering that, it is unknown why the Taiwanese chip design company still hasn’t patched the flaw in its chipsets that allows defeating the chain of trust while flashing. Although we have only seen the good side of the situation, it is even worse from a security perspective when you consider the hundreds of lesser-known device models using these MediaTek chips.

There is another aspect of the situation from the standpoint of the custom development community, whose interests we represent. A majority of MediaTek devices find themselves in an unsustainable combination of easy-to-brick and difficult-to-revive. On top of that, the forced authorization requirement really limits the potential of aftermarket development on them. The bypass method is nothing but a glimmer of hope for MediaTek device owners, who just want to take the hassle related to unbricking out of the modding scene.

How To Install Ultimate PI – Raspberry PI OS with The Cinnamon Desktop – Raspberry PI User

Ultimate PI is a re-spin of the Raspberry PI OS with the Cinnamon desktop environment as the desktop environment.

You will find a complete set of desktop applications including the Chromium web browser, Evolution email client, Rhythmbox audio player, VLC media player, Shotwell photo manager, LibreOffice office suite and the GIMP image editor.

This guide shows how to install Ultimate PI to an SD Card.

Ultimate PI – Raspberry PI OS With Cinnamon Desktop – Raspberry PI User

Raspberry PI OS is the best operating system for the Raspberry PI because it was built specifically for the Raspberry PI.

I have created a number of guides on this site showing how to make the Raspberry PI OS more useful for every day daily tasks.

For instance this guide shows how to view Netflix and Amazon Prime using Raspberry PI OS and this guide shows how to customise the Raspberry PI desktop.

How to verify your Linux Mint ISO image file - Real Linux User

Security and being conscious about your actions and decisions that could hamper or strengthen your Linux environment to be secure, is becoming more and more important. When you download a Linux ISO image file to create a bootable live environment to test a Linux distribution and eventually installing it on your production machine, it is important to be sure about its authenticity and integrity. In this article, as part of my Linux Mint tutorial series, I want to explain how to verify your Linux Mint ISO image file to start your secure Linux journey.

How To Install Docker on Manjaro 20 - idroot

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Docker on Manjaro 20. For those of you who didn’t know, Docker is an open-source project that automates the deployment of the application inside the software container. The container allows the developer to package up all project resources such as libraries, dependencies, assets, etc. Docker is written in a Go Programming language and is developed by Dot cloud. It is basically a container engine that uses the Linux Kernel features like namespaces and control groups to create containers on top of an operating system and automates the application deployment on the container.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of Docker on a Manjaro 20 (Nibia).

Format your USB drive with GParted - PragmaticLinux

USB drives typically come preformatted as FAT32 or NTFS file systems. Although Linux can handle this, the EXT4 file system offers advantage: EXT4 gives you far better control over file permissions and ownership. As whip-cream on top, you can stop worrying about data fragmentation as well. In this article you learn how to format your USB drive with the help of GParted. GParted is a graphical user interface program, available on pretty much all popular Linux distributions.

How to fix unzip error "End-of-central-directory signature not found"

If you are unable to extract files from a zip file and instead getting the error "End-of-central-directory signature not found", here is what you can do.

Foremost, you want to check that the archive is indeed a zip file, not generated by other similar archive programs such as gzip. So try uncompressing it with gunzip to eliminate this possibility.

If this does not help, changes are that the zip file was incompletely downloaded or got corrupted on your disk somehow. In the rest of the tutorial, let's find out how to fix, or at least get round, the unzip error when a zip file is corrupted or end of the file is truncated.

How to Add Ubuntu Host to Nagios Server using NRPE Plugin

In our previous guide, we touched base on how to install the Nagios Monitoring Server on Ubuntu 20.04. For this second part, we will show you how to add a Ubuntu host to Nagios server for monitoring using NRPE plugin.

NRPE, short for Nagios Remote Plugin Executor, is an agent that allows remote execution of scripts located on the remote host. It allows the gathering of metrics such as system load, disk utilization, and uptime, etc.

NRPE Server (agent) and Plugins are installed on the remote host. The agent will wait for check_nrpe request from Nagios Core Server. Once the agent receives the check request it will execute a plugin on the remote host and send back the request to Nagios server.

How to Reverse Lines in a File Character-Wise in Linux

There are some string manipulation or alternation tasks that can be programmed in scripting or a programming language quite easily. For example, changing the case of a text in a file.

There are some tasks that are very commonly required when it comes to text manipulation. One such task is reversing lines in a file. When we say reversing the lines, it can mean two things: reversing the order of lines in a file or reversing each line in the file character-wise.

In this article, we will learn about the command ‘rev’ which deals with reversing lines in a file character-wise in place.

Enable Conda-forge Channel For Conda Package Manager - OSTechNix

This guide explains what is conda-forge channel, how to install packages from conda-forge and finally how to permanently enable conda-forge channel for conda package manager from commandline as well as from Anaconda Navigator GUI in Linux.

Attempt to reproduce "Django 3 Tutorial & CRUD Example with MySQL and Bootstrap" on Fedora 33 KVM Guest

Run your favorite Windows applications on Linux | Opensource.com

In 2021, there are more reasons why people love Linux than ever before. In this series, I'll share 21 different reasons to use Linux. Here's how switching from Windows to Linux can be made seamless with WINE.

Do you have an application that only runs on Windows? Is that one application the one and only thing holding you back from switching to Linux? If so, you'll be happy to know about WINE, an open source project that has all but reinvented key Windows libraries so that applications compiled for Windows can run on Linux.

WINE stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator," which references the code driving this technology. Open source developers have worked since 1993 to translate any incoming Windows API calls an application makes to POSIX calls.