Tag Archives: Security

The SSL/SSH disaster

Due to the recent security hole discovered in Debian, which has also concerned various distributions – of course including Ubuntu – for 2 years, I simply closed all my SSH and OpenVPN accesses. I have had no time so far to check all the keys on my server. I prefer to stay on the safe [...]

Cold boot attack, not a threat to Full disk encryption (FDE)

Since the new cold boot attack hack is on the news, touching most of the software encryption solutions, I have wondered if it had any chance to concern also hardware encryption. Hardware encryption is provided by a few laptop makers, generally on high-range an business models. It has much less performance impact than software encryption, [...]

SinFP, part II : comparison with Nmap 4.20

Here is the update of my previous test of SinFP.

I compared then the output of SinFP and Nmap on different machines, and found out that SinFP made a slightly better job than Nmap in OS detection, though it is not the primary goal of Nmap whereas it is the one of SinFP.

However, I made a mistake that the author of SinFP made me aware of.

I conducted the tests of Nmap using the package of my distribution, thinking it was the latest one.

Actually, it was only the version 4.10. Moreover, the current version, 4.20, brought up a new OS detection engine.

Therefore, a new test with version 4.20 was absolutely needed.

SinFP, part I : introduction and comparison with Nmap 4.10

Last week, I found out a very interesting program, SinFP (those who are french and read the Misc magazine must already know ;) ).

Its goal is to help you detecting what operating system a remote machine is running.
Well, you will tell me that we already have many programs that does this job, starting from the so famous nmap… but the approach is quite different this time.