matthewhughes.co.uk

I’m pleased to announce that SecurityBSD 0.02 has finally been released after heavy delays. This has been a combination of personal obligations,  and the unrealistic expectation of releasing the first edition documentation for the project along with this edition. Needless to say, I’ve decided to push ahead for an early release of the distro.

Named after a comment on a Russian forum which described the SecurityBSD project as ‘banal sh**t’, it features all new security and developer tools and some boot sequence customization.

Thanks again to John Bell for bandwidth and hosting. It’s greatly appreciated.

As with the last edition, the username and password for login is root and toor. Expect some rudimentary documentation in the next two weeks, schedule permitting.

Download it here.

Thanks to Krysta McBurnie for the logo. Follow her on Twitter at @thenonbeliever. You can find her website here.

Leonardo Botelho, a Brazilian FreeBSD and computer security enthusiast is a greatly valued member and contributor to the SecurityBSD project. One of his personal, older projects accomplishes some of the goals of SecurityBSD, with an emphasis on eusability.

All in all, it’s all pretty cool. Screenshots below.

One of the contributors to the SecurityBSD project, Leonardo Botelho, from Brazil has been so kind as to make a SecurityBSD splash screen.

This will be included in version 0.02, and, in my opinion, is pretty damn cool.

Thanks again to Leonardo.

Announcing Security BSD 0.02 – Codename: Banal

Named after a comment describing SecurityBSD on a Russian blog which translated, meant ‘Banal Shit’, SecurityBSD 0.02 is the next step in the FreeBSD based security distribution. This distribution has three aims: Functionality, customization and expansion. It will feature more security tools, it will fix config files to make sure that each application works as intended and the boot process will be adorned with the SecurityBSD branding.

We are looking for a late June release date for a number of reasons, which will be discussed on a separate blog post.

This version will also be ported to the O2 Joggler, which I will elaborate on in a later post.

Matthew Hughes

The O2 Joggler is a pretty powerful piece of kit. It features a dual core Atom processor, 512 megs of RAM, 1 gig of storage, wireless networking, Ethernet and USB connectivity and a touch screen. You’d assume that this machine would be a good computer for the kids or for the kitchen, able to handle most tasks with ease.

You’d think wrong, as it’s actually an incredibly locked down piece of kit with sub standard piece of software with limited functionality. Built on Ubuntu 8.10 with O2 branded OpenPeek software, it features a calendar, video, photos, a Sky News RSS feed and a Sudoku game… And that’s about it. Such as shame, as it’s such a decent piece of kit. It’s also a very hackable piece of kit, and affordable too, being only £50.

It’s already been hacked, with Ubuntu Netbook remix and Android running on it. I’ve decided to buy one, and try to get FreeBSD and SecurityBSD running on it, ideally without turning it into a very expensive paperweight. In a couple of weeks, when I return home from Newcastle, I’ll be hacking the Joggler and posting about it here.

I’ve compiled a list of things to do. As I see fit, I’ll update this list with what needs to be done.

• Fix the config files. This should have been done before I made the release, but I was pressed for time. On the top of my head, I can think of two different apps which I pkg_add installed in to the distro, but didn’t edit the necessary config files in order to make them functional. Incidentally, these two applications are Snort and Netcat. Feel free to edit the config files chaps.
• Translations and keyboard layouts. Since I released SecurityBSD as a Virtualbox image, the keyboard layout is UK English and the language is British English. The vast majority of people in the world don’t actually speak English, and don’t live in the UK. I therefore will release other virtual machines in different languages and keyboard layouts, with the first two released being Russian and Portuguese.
• Expand! So far, SecurityBSD only has NMAP, Metasploit, Snort and Netcat, with only NMAP and Metasploit working! I plan to work through the NMAP 100 and investigate the potential for each app as a part of SecurityBSD.
• Investigate the possibility of a GUI interface. Personally, I’m pretty averse to the idea of having a GUI. I want it to be entirely CLI based, in order to make it easy to run on legacy machines. Usability has to be a consideration too, so I will play around with some of the ultra-lightweight windowing managers and see if one will be suitable for use with SecurityBSD.
• Customize the bootup process with a (to be designed) SecurityBSD logo in ASCII art.
• Make a SecurityBSD logo.
• Documentation. Documentation. More documentation.

As always, I need help with this, and I can always use volunteers. I want SecurityBSD to be a democratic, open project with a democratic, open development process. If you want to be a part, please, do e-mail me at me _-(at)-_ matthewhughes _-.-_ co _-.-_ uk or at admin _-(at)-_ securitybsd _-.-_ co _-.-_ uk.

SecurityBSD has been hit with an amazing amount of interest. I’m personally floored by how well it has been received by the online community, with major open source publications reporting on it. One commenter asked if I’d be porting the distro to the SPARC64 platform.

When I make SecurityBSD, I make it using the Virtualbox open source virtualizing software, which emulates an x86 platform, running on either Windows 7 32 bit or Ubuntu Linux 64 bit. I don’t actually have access to a SPARC64 system, so it’s impossible for me to produce for this platform. This issue is further exacerbated by the fact that many of the software which will be used in SecurityBSD will be wholly incompatible with certain platforms, namely the SPARC64 series of CPUs.

This, however, doesn’t discount the idea of me producing for the SPARC64 platform. If somebody was willing to let me SSH or Telnet in to a server running these series of processors or even donate a system running these CPUs, I’d happily work on the SPARC 64 (or any other architecture) port of SecurityBSD to the best of my ability.

Food for thought anyway.

SecurityBSD is an exciting new FreeBSD distro aimed at computer security professionals, and I’m very pleased to announce the first release of this young new operating system.

This release is not even slightly functional, and it is not currently even remotely reccomended for production use. Most of the applications included do not work at the moment. The purpose of this release is more of a display of intentions of the SecurityBSD project rather than any functional project.

To run this, you’ll have to install Sun Virtualbox, which can be downloaded for free online.

Many thanks to John Bell of the University of New Mexico for providing bandwidth and hosting.

Download here.

I’ll be sure to post some documentation on the weekend, along with a roadmap for the project.

Matt

Security BSD 0.01 will be the first release of the SecurityBSD distribution. It will reflect its codename as it has absolutely no reason to exist and serves no practical purpose in its current incarnation. This release is purely to express a commitment to the development and maintainance of the project and to raise interest and awareness of SecurityBSD.

It will be a bundling of the FreeBSD operating system which retains the FreeBSD branding and comes bundled with the NMAP, Metasploit and Kismet software packages, and will be distributed initially as a Virtualbox appliance, and eventually as installable media.

Later releases will feature a comprehensive security testing and data gathering tools and the Xorg and Openbox Window managers.

Security BSD will be released later this week. I’d like to thank @CleverJake from Twitter for kindly providing hosting.