Category: Cyber

I built it, I protected it, and I hacked it. I have been implementing and supporting Windows Public Key Infrastructures. Finally I turned to the red side.

Hello, World – from Code to Canvas

I have promised to report on my progress with presenting my digital art on canvas. but I had been sidetracked by inverted drawings. So, I created a first – and very modest – descriptive geometry drawing by code: I have tried to explain here what this software does; it is very different from my other…
Drawing With Code

What does it even mean? I see two main ways of drawing with code: 1) going for a representation of a thing you have in mind, or 2) using an algorithm and elements of randomness to surprise you. Representational I have code-drawn Lissajous curves with code – from a picture in mind before I started.…
Archaic Mathematical Art – and Poetry – from Code

What is the simplest way of creating art with code? I have been using software frameworks for mathematics and graphics in the past year. They “abstract away” how you actually place the dots on the virtual canvas. But I want something ancient, with a clear-cut boundary. My choice is the language C: created in the…
Drawing Slowly What Code Could Produce Quickly

Why? I am not trying to answer this question. I am just observing. I’ve started to draw – with compass and ruler – what code could generate in seconds. Or does it? I have forgotten all the jargon I learned in Descriptive Geometry classes decades ago. I am enjoying rediscovering the principles, just playing around.…
Naming Artworks with Help from Bots: From Celestial Arachnid to Ringscape Skyline

In the old days, my digital artworks were numbered:Reality and Imagination #0 to #12. Then I started Atoll of Diffraction and immediately christened each artwork, giving it a title like Peek through the Peaks. It added another interesting step to the creative process! So, I needed to make Reality and Imagination complete as well! After…
Found Poetry from nanoGPT’s Sampling of elkemental Text

Will the internet end in the implosion of all that self-referential mess? Will AI generate text from AI-generated text from AI-generated text? Let me be part of that! I used to create Found Poetry from my own articles (and my own poems), but I better make myself redundant and let AI help me! I fed…
Lord of the SID: How to Add the objectSID Attribute to a Certificate Manually

In May 2022 Microsoft has fixed a vulnerability related to certificate logon to Active Directory. As a non-privileged user you could escalate privileges by impersonating a Domain Controller, as you can join machines to the domain and thus control the dnsHostName attribute. Microsoft fixed this in an indirect way: Since last May, Windows Certification Authority…
$Dystopic Diffraction – ChatGPT and Poetry$

Dystopic Diffraction – ChatGPT and Poetry

I have been creating Found Poetry from search terms, from spam comments, from my own articles. I’ve followed strict rules and constraints. The stricter, the better. I am removing my consciousness as a human being from the creative process (Not my subconsciousness though!). Turning myself into a paper shuffling office clerk, feeding prompts to an…
Defused That SAN Flag!

In May, Microsoft has fixed a bug that allowed normal users to impersonate Domain Controllers. This bug allowed non-privileged users to obtain a logon certificate issued to a domain controller, because users can write to the Active Directory attribute dnsHostName of a computer they have joined to the domain. If a machine can enroll for…
How to Add a Subject Alternative Name Safely

I am writing about that PKI stuff again. I am running out of ideas for catchy introductions. So, here is a new post with old code! In Active Directory a UPN is mapped to a user automatically if it matches a user’s LDAP attribute userPrincipalName (and a DNS SAN is mapped to dnsHostName). A Windows…
Rogue Certificate Challenge: No Hardware Tokens, No Linux, Just a Web Server with Certificate Mapping.

I am back to my favorite security research: How to abuse certificates in a Windows / Active Directory environment! If an Active Directory integrated certification authority sign a certificate with a custom Subject Alternative Name of your choosing, you can impersonate any administrator in an AD forest. I’ve published two blog posts about how to…
Looking Back: Hacking and Defending Windows Public Key Infrastructure (ADCS)

I live at the fringes of the cybersecurity community. I have never attended infosec conferences. There will be a talk on PKI hacking at Blackhat 2021 soon: Top AD offensive security gurus are presenting comprehensive research on abusing ADCS (Active Directory Certificate Services). I only know about that, because I noticed backlinks from their article…
Secure Poetry: “I have been quite confident”

A poem from snippets of two postings on cybersecurity. Trying to carve words out of jargon. Details on the creative process at the bottom of the post. I have been quite confident I have been inspired In this simple way to find both options take note of an extra stealth factor I hardly ever visited…
Injecting an EFS Recovery Agent – and Let the Virus Scanner Help You!

How can you read files encrypted with Windows’s Encrypting File System if you neither have access to the owner’s encryption certificate and key and nor that of a legit data recovery agent (DRA) … but if you are a local administrator? This work is still inspired by the hackthebox machine Helpline. You were able to…
Parse Certificates Stored in the Windows Registry

You can parse the binary blobs that represent certificates stored in the Windows registry with certutil correctly, even when the Windows Explorer / GUI tells you that this is not a certificate. certutil seems to be able to handle / ignore meta data better. Once upon a time I played with the machine Ethereal provided by…
Infinity

New Year’s Eve 2019 seems infinitely far in the past. It was the first day news about this mysterious disease had been published in my country. Yet it seems infinitely far away at that time, somewhere in China. Today we see something glowing at the end of a weird long corridor. Despite horrible news, I…
Technology and Technics. Flolloping Floopily.

Once I started to create spam poetry and search term poetry, and I believed it was original. Then I discovered that great poets of the virtual scrapyard had come before me. Finally, I found serious articles about so-called Found Poetry and I found poets publishing their spam poetry in earnest. I learned about the Sokal…
$Gödel’s Proof$

Gödel’s Proof

Gödel’s proof is the (meta-)mathematical counterpart of the paradoxical statement This sentence is false. In his epic 1979 debut book Gödel, Escher, Bach Douglas Hofstadter intertwines computer science, math, art, biology with a simplified version of the proof. In 2007 he revisits these ideas in I Am a Strange Loop. Hofstadter writes: … at age…