The hard part is (almost) done!

The good news is, after I cooked a Pi, I was able to get a new one overnighted, and began work on that.  The changes that took place in the interim were small, yet drastic.  I moved the vulnerability scanner over to a virtual machine, no longer on the Pi, and I switched from OpenVAS to Nessus for the sake of simplicity.  Once the new Pi came in, everything began working very well.  The upgrade to 512mb of RAM seems to helping substantially.

All of my scripts are written, and all seem functional at least on some level.  There is still some fine-tuning left to go, but the hard work is mostly behind me, thanks to a 24 hour over 3 day scripting session.  I am still planning on adding in SSLStrip, and possibly encryption on the SD card.  Encrypting the SD card will make the device painfully slow, but it will also make it almost completely untouchable from the forensic point of view.  Ironically, the only non-functional script is my menu that calls my other scripts, I'm still in the process of troubleshooting that one.  Finally, I am planning to add in a program that was suggested by the guys at PWNie Express, zram.  Zram apparently effectively triples your RAM through some intense, high speed usage of swap space.

My final paper has been started, and will be worked on throughout the next few weeks, as I have a rough draft due in about two weeks.  From here on out, it should be just some smooth sailing and some basic script work until this project will be completed, and likely completely available on github.

Thanks
-DJ

I Cooked a Pi

     As you may know from my previous post, I am attempting to build a Raspberry Pi into a network attack and network monitoring box.  This project has been going on for a few weeks, with it's fair share of minor issues, as would be expected.  However, I recently ran into a fairly large problem that I had not anticipated.  It seems that I have nearly killed a Raspberry Pi.  The system is no longer at a functional level of RAM available, which seems to be due to the amount of work I had been attempting to do on this machine, which is made to be very basic.

     With that being said, I have ordered (and overnighted) another Pi, this one is one of the new models with 512mb of RAM.  Although that still is not a large amount, it is double what I had been working with.  This Pi will not be overclocked, at least not initially.  If I begin running into the same issues I had been, which revolve around running OpenVAS and Metasploit at the same time, I do have a backup plan which should allow that to function if need be.

     Thank you for continuing to read this blog, and I'll be sure to keep you updated on how the new Pi is handling the pressure.
-DJ