So here we are, 2012 and physical media are going away really fast. We won’t even talk about CDs which have been relegated to the role of plastic dust collectors; hard drives even are being abstracted by a myriad of cloud based solutions. Their purpose is shifting towards a container for the OS and nothing else. Filesystems & their hierarchies become hidden in a bid to remove any need to organize files, rather, you are supposed to throw it all up in the cloud and search on metadata.

While moving away from physical media is convenient and inevitable, I like the hierarchical organization that directories provide. What’s more intuitive than a labeled container with stuff in it?

How can we detach our hard drives from their physical shells, move them around in an omnipresent cloud and keep them secure?

By creating a file, attaching it to loopback & creating an encrypted partition in it!

Here’s how to do it
  • Create a file that will be your soft hard drive with:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/ffs bs=1024 count=524288

This will create a 512MB file (524288/1024).

  • Make sure that the loopback device #0 is free:

losetup /dev/loop0

You should see something telling you that there is “No such device or address”.

  • Attach the soft hard drive to the loopback device:

sudo losetup /dev/loop0 /tmp/ffs

  • And then make sure it was indeed attached by re-running:

losetup /dev/loop0

  • Create an encrypted partition on your attached soft hard drive:

sudo cryptsetup --verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/loop0 -c aes -s 256 -h sha256

  • Open your encrypted partition:

sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/loop0 ffs

  • Create a filesystem in it:

sudo mkfs.ext3 -m 1 /dev/mapper/ffs

  • And mount it like a regular disk:

sudo mount /dev/mapper/ffs /mnt

  • When you are done using your encrypted soft hard drive you will want to umount it:

sudo umount /mnt

  • Close it:

sudo cryptsetup luksClose ffs

  • Detach it from loopback:

loopsetup -d /dev/loop0

These steps can be automated of course. As a quick reminder, using the drive goes “loopback attach -> crypt open -> mount” and when you’re done it’s “umount -> crypt close -> loopback detach”.

That’s it! media-less & secure storage.

Tested on: Ubuntu 12.04 64b

Download

crackzor_1.0.tar.gz

Quick start
  1. Download & extract with “tar zxvf crackzor_1.0.tar.gz”
  2. Make sure you have the right packages in place
    sudo apt-get install build-essential libopenmpi-dev openmpi-bin libssl-dev
  3. Compile with
    mpicc -O3 crackzor.c -o crackzor -lssl -lcrypto
  4. Create a file called “machines” containing a newline separated list of every machine that are in your cluster, for example:
    machine00.domain.com
    machine01.domain.com
    machine02.domain.com
    machine03.domain.com
    machine04.domain.com
  5. Open MPI uses SSH for communication between nodes, as such, you need to make sure that the node you will be launching crakzor from is able to do SSH key based authentication to all the other nodes in the cluster. For my example above, if machine00 is where you will be working from, you will want to
    ssh-copy-id machine0X.domain.com

    where X E [0,4] (yes, machine00 needs to be able to SSH to itself).

  6. You now need to disseminate your executable across all the machines that will be running it:
    for machine in `cat machines`; do scp crackzor $machine:~; done

    Pro-tip: having network storage attached to all the machines makes this step unnecessary.

  7. Run with:
    mpirun -npernode Y -machinefile machines dist_crack fbade9e36a3f36d3d676c1b808451dd7 abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxzy 1 1

    where Y is the number of cores each machine in your cluster has. If you are running this on machines with 2 CPUs with 8 cores each, Y = 8 * 2 = 16.

Tested on Ubuntu 10.04 64b / Ubuntu 12.04 64b

Screenshots
> mpirun -npernode 16 -machinefile machines ./crackzor 7ca4793dcdff46ecda38e48d65b6c913 abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxzyABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 1 7

This is what “htop” looks like with a bunch of processes spawned & hammering every core:

Statistics

For the purpose of testing crackzor, we give it the md5 hash of an 8 character word and tell it to bruteforce it up to 7 characters. This insures that we will compute every permutation up to 7 character longs. The characters I asked it to permute are “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxzyABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ”, our sample space size is thus 52^7 + 52^6 + 52^5 + 52^4 + 52^3 + 52^2 + 52^1 = 1,048,229,971,204.

Here is the raw data, and here it is graphed:

I wish it would show the linear progression more but 3 things got in the way:

  1. approaching the machine’s actual number of cores on the Dell blades leave little room for linear expansion
  2. which is emphasized in a multiuser environment where other users run other computation
  3. the EC2 bar flattens the graph a bit but I still wanted to show how it compares

Ideally I would run through a few iterations of EC2 to observe its progression but hey, it’s expensive :).

Limitations
  • Right now, the only hashing algorithm supported by crackzor is MD5. It can very easily be expanded upon.
  • I also may not be using the fastest MD5 method with the fastest call, distribution is what I’m interested in.
  • Distributing password cracking among multiple machines is throwing linear resources to an exponential problem!

Well, this is it. After much prep work I have finally released my first package of bees in the hive. Everything did not go according to plan, the candy separating the queen from the rest of the colony had already been eaten. As a result the queen did not get a chance to be released by the workers. I managed to keep her in there while I was releasing the remaining 3lbs of bees. Things went well other than this and I am hopeful that she’ll be accepted by the others as they had been traveling together for a while. I’ll try and locate her in a couple of days and if I can’t find her, I will rush order another queen. It’s nice that I get another shot if needed.

All the extensive information I gathered online (various blogs, Youtube videos) prepared me pretty well for what to do. Nothing however can prepare you for the experience of handling a liquid-like swarm of buzzing bees. It was very impressive & I was definitely glad I got a full suit. Not that they were even really pissed at me for shaking them in their new hive. But it felt like a wrong move could change everything for the worse very fast. I eventually learned to trust my suit.

I went back to install an electric fence with a friend the next morning (bears & skunks are an issue in the area), no buzzing was to be heard. Nothing at all, I opened a couple of bars and couldn’t see a thing. Finally I found them on a few bars and disturbing them made the whole swarm start the day. It was super cool to see them do their thing.

The hive in its final location, with a new roof & fenced in to withstand the local wildlife

The hive actually faces an orchard which is starting to bloom, perfect timing for some pollination help. I intend on taking more pictures in a few days.

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