Projects, projects, projects

Patents and Inventions

Real-time Ad Hoc Traffic Alert Distribution
United States patent number 6,708,107. It describes a way to make cars on the road be able to communicate among themselves using wireless communication in such a way that they can automatically detect the existence and location of a traffic jam, in hopes that at least some of them can find an alternate route around the jam.

Software Projects

Some sort of record: http://support.lcg.org/Whoswho/view_record.php3?UID=404

urlmon
It has a readme file. Read it.
urlmon has a web site with the source and other stuff

timewarp
timewarp allows you to continue using software binaries that have 'expired', that is, no longer function due to a logical 'time bomb' implanted in it that makes it stop working after a certain date. (This is done by some companies to force you to periodically upgrade or have to buy the full product. It convinces user-specified applications that the current time is actually earlier than it really is, so the applications think that the expiration date hasn't past. But you don't need to turn back the system clock, which would affect all programs. It works on Linux (kernel 2.0.33 and better). Here is its announcement, and here is the source code. Oh yeah, here is the LSM file. ( Here is Grayson-timewarp. It _might_ work for 2.1 kernels, but I have not tested it and cannot speak for it (nor support it, for the time being).)

paudio (or /proc/audio)
This is a loadable kernel modules and kernel patch that allows you to read and save a copy of the data currently being played by the soundcard. This allows you to save any data being played, regardless of what software is used to play it, or what format the data regardless of what software is used to play it, or what format the data is in.

Some audio streaming software doesn't allow audio data to be saved to disk, and some use formats whose specifications are not publically available. This is a way around these problems. Check out the announcement and LSM entry.

This is useful also for anyone interested in how the /proc filesystem works, how some of the soundcard works, or how loadable modules work.

fibonacci
This is a loadable Linux kernel module that creates a file called /proc/fib, to which one writes a numeric value and then reads the fibonacci number for that value. It is my first attempt at kernel hacking, and is intended to serve no useful function (in fact, it can be evil--see the readme for more information) but to allow me to learn how /proc and to some degree the VFS of Linux work, and as a reference for anyone else who wants to know these things. Humberto R. Baptista has ported fib to the 2.2 kernel series. A patch file and the updated source are here.

Slow Rain
My modification to the classic rain program from the BSD-games collection, modified to take an integer between 1 and 9 (inclusive), to be used as a scaling factor to modify how rapidly the raindrops strike your monitor.

Writing Projects

With Nader Mehravari and Scott Rush at Lockheed Martin Systems Integration, I co-authored and co-presented Principals and Practice of Modern Information Security, which was presented in 8 parts internally to Lockheed and presented as a day-long tutorial at the ACM SIGSOFT 8th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, November 6, 2000.

We recently re-presented this tutorial at Military Communications Symposium 2001 (MILCOMM) in Tyson's Corner, VA on October 31, 2001. http://www.milcom.org/2001/tutorials.htm#T-5

Lockheed Martin Advanced Technologies

Network Data Routing in Dynamic Environments of Potentially Mobile Nodes, published in the proceedings of SPIE AeroSense 2002.

Proof-of-concept Prototype of a Portable Wireless Battlefield Ministration Tracking System, presented at presented at Military Communications International Symposium MILCOM 2002. (Tyson's Corner, VA, October 31, 2001)

A State-of-the-Art Environment for Research, Design, Evaluation, Prototyping, and Integration of Dual-Use Advanced Networking and Network-Centric Information Technologies, presented at Military Communications International Symposium MILCOM 1999 (Atlantic City, NJ, November 3, 1999). (This is about some work we do in our labs.) (original MSWord97 file.)

Portable Wireless Battlefield Ministrations Tracking and Information System presented at Military Communications International Symposium MILCOM 1999 (Atlantic City, NJ, November 3, 1999) (This talks about the BMTS work we did.) (original MSWord97 file.)

(See some pictures from the MILCOM 1999 conference floor.)

Setting up a Universal File Server -- For a class that my friend Mike Eschenbrenner taught for Syracuse University's IST 555 (Spring 200) course, I wrote a lab on setting up a Linux machine to serve the same set content via HTTP, SMB, NFS, and FTP.   April 2001 (The original Star Office-formatted file is here, MS Office format here.)

Securing a Universal File Server -- The sequel to Setting up a Universal File Server, this lab shows how to improve access control to a Universal File Server, serving via HTTP, SMB, NFS, and FTP.   April 2001 (The original Star Office-formatted file is here, MS Office format here.)

Freelance Technical Writing

I am available to do freelance technical writing on many subjects, including articles on Perl programming, network protocols (including protocol analyzers), information security (PKI, certificates, firewalls, ipchains, iptables, SSH, etc). I specialize in Open Source software and Network protocol tutorials. I no longer write compartive product reviews, and try to stay clear of product reviews in general, due to the possiblility that my conclusions may be construed as the opinion of my employer.

Secure Enterprise Magazine


Nose Around with Snort -- A Deployment Guide about how to use a free Intrusion Detection tool called Snort to monitor policy compliance on your IP network. My working title was "Snort Like a Pig". ("Pig" as in "Police". Geddit?) .   September 01, 2005 (http://www.secureenterprisemag.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=169400384) PDF.

Prescient PDA Protection -- A review of basic security policies and products as applied to PDAs and cell phones.   March 07, 2005 (http://nwc.secureenterprisemag.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=60401068) .

Deployment Guide: Secure Shell -- A step by step guide for SSH-based TCP tunneling of POP3 and SMTP traffic.   July 21, 2004 (http://www.securitypipeline.com/howto/22103854) PDF.

Make It & Break It: Data Scrubbing: Keeping Your Data Squeaky Clean -- A HOWTO for writing web applications that scrubs incoming data in order to prevent bad guys from using your applications to break in to your computers, with examples in Perl and PHP.   February 18, 2004 (http://www.nwc.securitypipeline.com/howto/17602434) PDF.

chroot() Deployment Guide: Jail Time -- A step by step guide for putting the vsftpd FTP daemon in a chroot configuration on Red Hat Linux 9.   October 21, 2003 (http://www.nwc.securitypipeline.com/howto/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=15306130) PDF.

Network Computing Magazine


Modular Linux Authentication -- A Workshop on using Pluggable Authenticaion Modules with Linux, especially for integrating into Windows-based authentication mechanisms.   March 4, 2002 (http://www.networkcomputing.com/1305/1305ws1.html) PDF.

Linux Power Tuning -- A Workshop on performance tuning a Linux-based server.   November 13, 2000 (http://www.networkcomputing.com/1122/1122ws2.html)

AC200 -- Sneak Preview of yet another traffic shaper, but this does load balancing too!   June 1, 1998 (http://www.networkcomputing.com/912/912sp3.html)

Xedia Access Point 10 -- Review of the AP10, a traffic shaper (or network bandwidth manager). Pretty neat box.   May 1, 1998 (http://www.networkcomputing.com/908/908sp4.html)

HP AdvanceStack 800T -- This was a plain old ethernet 10Mbps switch, but it has a cool web-based management agent. Excellent product! (Unique at the time.)   March 15, 1998 (http://www.networkcomputing.com/905/905sp2.html)

NetSuite Professional Audit -- My first solo published writing (I wrote a perl debugger tutorial In August 1997, but it wasn't printed until May 1998.) This product really isn't too amazing, but it was a good experience in getting me to think critically about other people's software.   November 15, 1997 (http://www.networkcomputing.com/821/821sp4.html)

Proprietary Infrastructure Management Review -- Another NWC article where I help Bruce Boardman with a review. Again, he did most of the work (and got all the credit, but don't worry, I got paid all the same :).   May 15, 1997 (http://www.networkcomputing.com/809/809r1.html)

NNTP News Server Evaluations -- Assisted my friend Dan Backman (who did most the work) in writing a news servers critique. I wrote some perl scripts to create load and measure latency on the servers.   February 15, 1997 (http://www.networkcomputing.com/803/803r2.html)

Linux Journal


Astara Security Linux V4 -- I review a nifty all-in-one Linux-based firewall/proxy/relay.  Linux Journal #111, July 2003 (Available online only with subscription to Linux Journal at http://interactive.linuxjournal.com/Magazines/LJ111/6716.html, local copy here)

Build a Virtual CD-ROM Jukebox -- Use a low-cost, scalable Linux server to share CD-ROM image files to Windows clients.   Linux Journal #96, April 2002 (Available online only with subscription to Linux Journal at http://interactive.linuxjournal.com/Magazines/LJ96/5639.html, local copy here)

VNC, Transparently -- Secure, Transparent, and Ubiquitous Desktops with VNC and OpenSSH, Part 1 of 2.   January 2002 (http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5499, local copy here)

VNC, Securely -- Secure, Transparent, and Ubiquitous Desktops with VNC and OpenSSH, Part 2 of 2.   online only, January 2002 (http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5560 , local copy here)

The Perl Debugger -- An article I wrote for issue 49 of the The Linux Journal. I really enjoy writing tutorials, much more than product reviews.  May 1998 (http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=2484, local copy here)

Miscellaneous


Perl Commandline Primer -- An introduction to using the commandline features of perl.

The Linux 2.0.30 scheduler -- An early version of a study of the Linux scheduler I did this summer. I hope to get it included in the Kernel Hacker's Guide someday. (Here is an email message I sent to someone, with some explanations of things that have to do with the scheduler, i.e. how much time a process executes before being rescheduled, and how one might implement a different scheduling decision algorithm.)

Ackermans' Function -- A question on a homework from my Analysis of Algorithms class wanted the answer to Ackerman 4,4. Well Ackerman is an algorithm that grows at an incredible rate. Check out my solution. (I've been told this isn't the "classic" Ackerman function. Oh well.)