Setting Up a Remote Rescue Environment with OpenWRT and PXE

A client of mine called recently with a busted computer. There was a power outage at his site and upon powering up one of their machines he was greeted with the dreaded "No bootable devices found" text error message right after the Dell splash screen. I suspected hard drive failure …

Continuous Monitoring on a Budget at BSides Atlanta 2019

Thanks to the BSides Atlanta Organizers and Volunteers who gave us the opportunity to share what we've been working on! Plus, they made a really cool badge.

We've been doing some neat work with various open-source projects and tools (like OpenWRT, Python, OpenVPN, Docker, Apache NiFi) to create an inexpensive …

OpenWRT at BSides Augusta 2018

Thanks to all the BSides Augusta Organizers and Volunteers who made for an awesome conference! Augusta attracts some really talented people thanks to them!

I'm thankful that I had the opportunity to share how OpenWRT and some cheap SOHO routers can make for a fun environment to protect and monitor …

Installing OpenWRT on a Linksys EA4500

Choosing a router to run OpenWRT on is a complex task... OpenWRT's Table of Hardware has the complete documentation on what models are supported and which are not. OpenWRT even provides a nice filter for their Table of Hardware of devices that are "Ideal for OpenWRT".

I chose the Linksys …

Content Filtering - OpenDNS Family Shield on OpenWRT

I've written about content filtering recently. To rehash: There is no technology silver bullet to filter out all the bad while leaving the good. There is no substitute for parental presence and conversations with your kids. But that doesn't mean we can't use technology to try to prevent accidents. My …

Cheap (<$40) Network Tap with OpenWRT

A network tap is a handy device that lets you copy the packets going in and out of your network to another computer. When you want to see all of what is passing through your network, a tap is an easy way to grab it. Problem is, active network taps …

Disable IPv6 on OpenWRT

I'm not bought in to using IPv6 yet and frankly, I haven't messed with all of its settings enough to feel comfortable that I can fully protect it. So, I typically disable it on my OpenWRT devices. Here's the magic shell commands that turn it off for the lan and …

System Use Notification Banner on OpenWRT

Numerous standards suggest or require the use of a login banner that clearly informs legitimate users and attackers that the system is for authorized users only. Substitute in your organization's banner below if this standard text isn't sufficient.

cat > /etc/banner <<EOF
Authorized Users Only!
Any attempted or unauthorized access …

Parental Controls - Enforcing Google SafeSearch and YouTube Kids Mode from dnsmasq on OpenWRT

I'm a proud parent raising kids in an Internet-connected age. And I've spoken with many parents also trying to do the same. And while there is so much good stuff out there on the Internet, there is also so much bad stuff... And we don't want them accidentally stumbling on …

Network Traffic Inspection - TCPDUMP on OpenWRT

All the time when something is broken on my network (e.g. network outage, system down, traffic slow), tcpdump is my "goto" tool for investigation of the root problem. But the question is: where do I run it? A typical home network setup looks something like this:

There are a …

OpenWRT - Mounting USB Storage

Typical OpenWRT devices usually have pretty limited storage. Some have 128MB+ today, but the ones I most often use have 32MB or less. Not a lot of flash memory for storing logs or full PCAP captures! But many of these home routers have USB ports and we can use these …

Cracking WPA2 Passwords

I wanted to demo for a client how easy it would be to crack a WiFi network with a simple password. So I setup a Linksys EA3500 router (flashed with LEDE) and configured it to use a variation (changed capitalization and punctuation on the end) on a simple password from …