#!/zitstif.no-ip.org/

Can I recommend from my experience for any average Joe, security specialist, or even computer enthusiast to have a rooted, custom kernel, Nethunter Android based phone as their primary cell phone to rely on? Honestly no, unless you have the time, resources, and expertise to troubleshoot issues with the device. Don’t get me wrong, it is awesome to have a device that fits in your pocket that when setup right, can do nmap vulnerability scans, arp poisoning, run the Social Engineering Toolkit and a plethora of other tools/actions. But you have to remember, projects like Nethunter, which are great for what they are, are community driven and fixes/issues may have to be resolved by the end user themselves.

If you’re going to venture down this path, feel free to but take some things into consideration. If this is going to be your primary phone, in the event of an emergency, can you count on it to not freeze or reboot when you need it? This is not to say that vanilla/stock phones won’t let you down but usually the vanilla/stock phones have more support and tend to be more stable. So with a security suite like Nethunter, which is not a ROM but is meant to run on top of a stock Android OS with a custom kernel, in my humble opinion you’re only adding complexity to the device and more chances to have an unstable device.

Another question you have to ask yourself would include, do you trust all these tools/pieces of software on your primary phone that you may use for banking and private matters? By rooting your phone and installing the likes of Nethunter, you are potentially turning your phone into a more advanced spying tool that could be used against you. (Also take note that rooting your phone just makes it less secure.) Just think of this, if an adversary can get onto a server through whatever exploitative means and they discovered a Kali chroot environment, how much more potential damage could they do? Now imagine this ‘server’ is your phone that you constantly keep on and charged and with you at nearly all times.

This is to not say that I advocate against ‘hacker’ phones or turning phones into offensive security devices. My point is that there’s a lot to take into consideration.  If you want a stable phone to do your regular smart phone related matters on, I recommend something stock with little to no mods and if you want a ‘hacker’ phone, I recommend getting a second phone that you do not heavily rely on. 

Now if we could run virtual machines on our phones with security hardened hardware passthrough options… that would make things interesting. (Interesting discussion here .)

Thanks to Shawn Merdinger, from infosecisland for the inspiration and  thanks to many others in the information security community, I’m continuing with my ‘Weaponizing the Nokia N900’ series with another entry.

Firstly, I would like to mention that I’m contemplating on writing a program to automate the process of turning your N900 into a pentester’s device. This is largely due to the fact that the neopwn project seems to have come to a stand still. I have attempted contacting an individual from the neopwn project, however I haven’t had much luck.

In this post I will cover some of the other attacks you can carry out with your N900 as a rogue ap point using dns spoofing and David Kennedy‘s Social Engineering Toolkit. Along with that, I’ll give you information on how to get packet injection working so the aircrack suite is more useful to you.

Rogue AP Goodness:

1.) Download SET to your n900 and take note of this information:

a.) You’ll need to install some additional python modules  such as, python-crypto. Python-crypto is in the repositories if you have the extra repositorise that I mentioned  in an earlier post: http://zitstif.no-ip.org/?p=451

b.) I wasn’t able to find python-pexpect in the repositories, but luckily SET was able to download it and install it for me.

c.) If you’re planning on using metasploit in tandem with SET, you’ll need to do as follows:

ln -s /usr/bin/rub1.8 /usr/bin/ruby

Oddly enough, SET does not do a check for whether or not if you have ruby installed. I would implement something like this some where in the SET project:

http://zitstif.no-ip.org/setfix.txt

2.) See my earlier post on how to setup your n900 as a rogue ap point: http://zitstif.no-ip.org/?p=459 (Keep in mind though we’re going to inject a new step or two.)

3.) After step 4 (in the earlier rogue ap point instructions) load up SET and select number 2 for the website attack vectors section

4.) Select option 1 for the java applet attack method

5.) Now select the site cloner option

6.) Select a website to clone (Hmm anyone up for Facebook?! 😉 )

7.) For the payload, give SET’s own payload a try, it’s pretty powerful and you can even run a keylogger. In addition to that for the moment, this attack bypasses some AV solutions. (The system I tested this on was a fully patched Windows 7 x64 system that has Microsoft Security Essentials up to date, and I was able to get a session without any AV alarms going off.)

8.) Before you fire up ettercap, go to etter.dns and create an entry like this (especially if you’re using the mobilehotspot application)

www.facebook.com     A      10.105.242.1

9.) Now run this:

ettercap -i wlan0 -q -T -p -u // // -P dns_spoof

What I adore about this attack, is the java applet infection method. It’s a great social engineering method for gaining access to victim’s machines. Plus with SET, you don’t need sun-java6-jdk, which doesn’t appear to be available in the n900’s repositories.

I also wanted to note, that I wasn’t able to get the java applet to work against OSX systems or Linux systems. 🙁

Aircrack-ng goodness:

I was able to get packet injection working and was able to successfully use the chop-chop attack on a WEP network to create enough IVs and then crack the WEP key in about 10 minutes.

Please see this blog entry:

http://david.gnedt.eu/blog/wl1251/

Also pay close attention to:

http://david.gnedt.eu/wl1251/README

Be careful about using this driver because it seems to drain battery life quite quickly.

(Speaking of which..)

Additional notes:

One more tip I would like to share with fellow N900 owners on extending battery life is as follows:

-Uninstall applications that eat up a lot of CPU time and run in the background

-Disable your wifi connection if you’re not using it

-Dim the brightness of your screen

-Disable anything you don’t need or aren’t currently using

-Use an application to that allows you to switch between 3G and 2G networks. If you’re just using SMS and calling people, all you need is the 2G network. (In my humble opinion)

That’s all for now. As usual, more to come!