Questionable USBs FTW

I bought some used Def Con USB sticks on ebay. They contain official presentations. I didn’t buy them for the presentations, though — those are available online on Def Con’s media site. I bought them because they are pretty cool Def Con branded swag.

Since I won three separate auctions (DC27, DC26, and one from Blackhat), I got a refund from the seller for a combined shipping discount. When I saw the seller’s name, I did a double-take.

I just bought USB sticks from one of the most well-known hackers on the planet.

This should be fun. And not scary at all.

Defcon badge info

SO the Defcon Badge deep-dive was well-received during tonight’s Zoom, there were some interesting ideas thrown about. For now, we’re collecting everything we figure out about it in the bad decisions discord. If you’re not on that, ask yourself what you’re even doing with your life.

July 27 – Monthly Meetup (still Zoom)

It’s ramp-up-for-Defcon time, and for once there’s actually an AGENDA for tonight’s meeting!

No, it’s not written anywhere. It’s just in my head. But that’s still an improvement.

Managing changed SSH keys in CentOS 8

All these years, I’ve dealt with changed SSH keys (you know, you go to SSH into something and you get the “key has changed” error:

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that a host key has just been changed.

probably because you rebuilt the target server/vm, or you changed an IP somewhere, or whatever) by removing the entry from ~/.ssh/known_hosts. It’s a few annoying extra steps, but it has always worked for me. Call it “old reliable.”

With the release of CentOS 8, everything changes. Known hosts are now managed by sss. Maybe this happened somewhere else and I wasn’t aware of it, but this is how I was made aware of it:

Message as above, along with:
Offending ED25519 key in /var/lib/sss/pubconf/known_hosts:6

Well that’s new. And you can’t delete from that file, because it’s generated behind the scenes and then comes right back. Generated from ~/.ssh/known_hosts, apparently. And nobody wants to enter a new key manually as it suggests. The answer?

ssh-keyscan -t ecdsa 10.120.x.x >> ~/.ssh/known_hosts

(substituting your target IP, of course). Almost worth aliasing “whoopsienewkey” to it with a variable for the IP.

Anyhow, that’s all, I hope you’ve learned something today to make your day easier and brighter.

Defcon28 Badge

Anybody interested in collaborating to investigate the Defcon 28 tape badge to uncover its secrets? Hit me up if you’ve got ideas and cycles.

Hackerspace Bookshelf…

The DC540 hackerspace just got a bookshelf. It’d be pretty cool if it had more titles on it that are relevant to this thing of ours. If you’ve got infosec, hacking, telephony, o’reilly books, etc., you no longer need, please consider donating.