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Showing posts from August, 2021

Using PGPy to encrypt and decrypt files and messages

 PGPy is a library for python that enables the creation, storage, and encryption/decryption of PGP keys and files in python. Recently, in a small project to reacquaint myself with python, I used PGPy for key generation and encryption and decryption. That project can be found in my github at  https://github.com/lpowell . The goal of the project was to use command-line switches to control the program, and to provide basic encryption and decryption capabilities, along with rot13 and base64 encoding.  First, to load in a key use key, _ = pgpy.PGPKey.from_file(keyfilename) . This loads the key from either a binary or ASCII armored file. You can swap out .from_file for .from_blob , if you plan on using a key stored in a string or bytes object rather than a file. In my example code, I pull the key from a file, as I found it to be the simpler method.  Next, you'll need to open a file or create a string or bytes object that contains the message you wish to encrypt. We'll call this file

Installing the Ubertooth on the Mac mini M1

 For my video project, one of the demonstrations included using an Ubertooth One to scan for Bluetooth and BLE packets. This blog post will cover the installation of the Ubertooth One on the Mac mini M1. The official install guide for Mac devices didn't work very well for me, and I had to install some extra tools in order to get it to work. The examples assume you are using Python 3, and have homebrew installed.  To begin, follow the instructions found here:  https://github.com/greatscottgadgets/ubertooth/wiki/Build-Guide . Additionally, you may find that you need to install pytq5, numpy, and qtpy. To do this, simply run Python3 pip install pyqt5, numpy, qtpy. This will install the required libraries needed to run the Ubertooth tools. There are multiple ways to install pip on an OS X device, but I suggest using homebrew to install python3, which should install pip as well. Next, you will need to update the firmware of the device. When downloading the tools, a firmware directory sh

Malware analysis series by John Hammond

John Hammond, a YouTuber and Cybersecurity researcher, has a series on Youtube where he analyses malware artifacts and discerns their purpose and method of attack. For most of these, he gets access to known malware files, and then blindly goes through them, de-obfuscating and cleaning them up, in order to present a readable version that can be analyzed. I personally find these videos very exciting and entertaining, as well as incredibly educating. He also has several other series and interesting videos on his channel that I highly recommend for anyone interested in software security and other general security topics.  Link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJBKxs8UnFE